3B Limo

Archive for December, 2009

As owner of a detached single-family home, you’re the king or queen of your castle. As the owner of a condo unit, you still have your crown, but then so do all the other owners. Even royalty, when pressed into coexistence, must acknowledge some restrictions as to what can and cannot be done with the condo unit itself, as well as with those areas that are owned in common with other kings and queens. So you can arrange your furniture however you please and use any wallpaper you like in your living room, but you may not be able to paint the outside of your windows the color of your choice. When you buy into a condo community, you also buy into its rules and regulations, so it’s a good idea to find out what they are before you commit yourself to buying.
Many condominiums prohibit pets. Some, as noted before, won’t allow owners to rent their units, even for short periods of time. Some even limit the amount of time visitors (including relatives) can stay. Still others have detailed rules governing what an owner can and cannot do to the outside of his or her condo.
So if you’re planning to run a mail-order business from the spare bedroom, or see psychiatric patients in the study, you’d better make sure there aren’t any rules prohibiting nonresidential uses of the unit. And you’d better be sure that the owner of the unit you’re planning to buy hasn’t made any unauthorized changes — installing windows different from those in place elsewhere in the building, for example. If such changes have been made without the board’s permission and have not been corrected by the time you buy, you could get stuck with the cost of undoing the previous owner’s damage.