Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Unit Entitlements

[Fred-List manager (fholson]

Chuck Harrison <cfharr [at] gmail.com>
is the author of the message below.  It was posted by Fred of
the Cohousing-L management team <cohousing-l-owner [at] cohousing.org>
after putting an image (was "image.png") from their legal documents
of a section about Common Expense Liability at:
http://l.cohousing.org/wsc-shared-exp.png

There was also a format issue (Content-Type: multipart/related).

--------------------  FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS --------------------
Our community was built in 1999 as a Washington State condominium; the
corresponding phrase in our legal documents is Common Expense Liability".
Half of our assessment is distributed equally per unit, the other half is
based on floor area (with complicated adjustments for finished vs
unfinished space).
[image: image.png]
[ see http://l.cohousing.org/wsc-shared-exp.png ]
If an owner makes a substantial remodel it may change the floor areas and
the assessment ratios are recomputed for the whole community.

This formula has been "good enough" and there are only occasional
grumblings about it.

The biggest issue is that our community water service is not individually
metered, so water usage is a Common Expense that is allocated according to
the formula. In our situation water+sewer costs are about 20% of our
overall budget. Some suggestions have been made about including a
correction term (e.g. based on number of occupants) to more fairly
distribute water costs but no proposal seemed practical. Definitely
consider per-unit metering to avoid this question.


On Sat, Jul 6, 2024 at 2:56 PM Elizabeth Rosenau <ejrosenau [at] gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello!!
>
> I’m part of a Canadian community called Compass Cohousing that’s planning
> to starting building soon.  We are looking to engage realtors and this has
> brought up the subject of “unit entitlements” as a component of setting our
> monthly Strata fees.  (I believe our Strata fees may be analogous to HOA
> fees in the USA.)
>
> Right now we are using the square footage of each unit to calculate those
> fees.  We realize that square footage alone is not the ideal way forward
> because it doesn’t take into consideration the expense of operating common
> facilities which we assume will be used by residents of all unit sizes.
>
> Here are my questions:  What was your community’s experience deciding how
> to calculate unit entitlements?  Has your community been satisfied with the
> way the entitlements work or have there been struggles or pushback?  Is it
> easy to change unit entitlements after occupancy?
>
> Thanks in advance for any wisdom you may have to share.
>
> Elizabeth Rosenau,  Compass Cohousing.