Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Monthly fees

[Jim Snyder-Grant (danasg]

(Jim Snyder-Grant here, writing from my wife's email account)

There have been a couple of questions about monthly fees recently.  Here's
the story from New View (Acton MA).

Our condo fees range from around 200 to 300 / month per household. We have
24 units, a bunch of semi-intricate common land, and a common house.
Services & materials are generally more pricey in Massachusetts than
elsewhere. The range is based on our beneficial interest percentages. We
calculated these when we moved in, and recalculated them again a year ago.
We will recalc them again if anyone adds a bunch of livable square feet to
their house.

The formula is in the archives somewhere, but roughly we looked at an
estimate of our condo expenses we had prepared professionally, and a
committee prosposed dividing the common expenses up into three buckets

1. Condo expenses for exterior house maintenance, mostly painting &
roofing. This makes up about 25% of the formula. We calc this based on an
approximation of the maintainable exterior square surface area of each
house, imagining each house as a rectangular solid to keep the math simple.
(We have a mixed of attached and detached houses)

2. Condo expenses that seem like they are probably in proportion to the
number of people in each household. This is another 25% of the formula.
Since it would be impractical for us to be changing condo fees every time a
household seemed  to change size, the proxy for this is livable square
footage of each unit. We figure, over time, larger houses tend to have more
people in them. We had these numbers calculated anyway by our architect,
because these went into the house price formula.

3.Condo expenses that we had no particular idea how to split up, where it
seemed fair enough to distribute them equally. This was about 50% of
theformula.

What drives our costs? Here's our few biggest items:

Landscaping - 19,000. A lot of this is still start-up expense associated
with creating landscaping that we hope & expect will be less expensive in
the long run (building up lawns with deep roots that can be chemical free
in the long run & require less water; expanding the number of bushes and
trees on site; etc.). But still, many of us continue to be astonished how
much work even half-decent landscaping takes, and we are constantly trying
to figure out how to do more with less in this area. 

Snowplowing - 7000. This has been a lot more in previous years, but we have
decided to dial this back a bit & instead slowly build up a contingency for
heavy snow years. A professional plow does our roads & parking lots &
emergency-access pedestrian spine; we do the sidewalks ourselves with our
own little tractor with snow-blower attachment. 

Property & Liability taxes - 6000. Next year, we will put this out to bid
again. We all suspect this may be too high.

Outside maintenance - 5000. We do a lot ourselves, but we do hire for a
number of skilled or very time-critical jobs. Examples include
Electricians, plumbers, and cleaning out the gutters, drains & drainage
systems.

I'm happy to share more info. We are now into our 4th year of budgeting and
condo fee setting. We are still very much amateurs, but we are learning. We
have kept the fees the same for three years now, as we learn where we are
over- and under- estimating.

-Jim Snyder-Grant
jimsg [at] newview.org  <--- please reply to here