How are the HOA fees set up, why do the Cottage and One Bedrooms pay more than the Studios. The answer lies in the amount of voting power the units have.
Type #Units Vote Total Common Interest
A - Studio 24 .6 14.4
A - One Bedroom 24 .8 19.2
B - Studio 84 .6 50.4
C - One Bedroom 16 _______1 ________ 16__
148 100%
HOA fees are directly proportional to the amount of voting power a unit has.
Due to the recent increase in Homeowners Fees it’s been brought up that the fee’s, and I suppose voting powers should be figured by unit square footage, because the upper studio units that have added loft bedrooms are not paying enough in the opinion of some owners. However, in all fairness, the lofted units should then have an additional voting percentage as well and the lower studio percentage would have to be reduced to stay within 100 votes total.
We believe that there are 40 units that have a bed in the lofted area, there are 56 units that have permanent stairs to a second level in the unit, not sure what the second level is used for. Does any unit that has a loft need to pay for that square footage even if it’s not a bedroom area?
A change to square footage would require a Founding Documents Change, which I’m told is a very difficult change and rather costly thing to do.
So what’s another idea to make HOA fees more fair is to have fee’s based on the amount of time the unit is occupied. A large portion of our budget is utilities and the units that are occupied more use more electric, water and propane. That would require Homeowners to report unit occupancy. Unit occupancy would be very helpful to know when trying to figure things like water, electric and propane bill fluctuations. Our complex was built like a Hotel, so there is currently no way to meter each unit without spending a significant amount of money to change our basic infrastructure.
There could be lots of ways to try to make HOA fees more fair, but as you can see it gets all very complicated very fast. Enforcing our House Rules, Renovations rules and whatnot gets complicated very fast. The goal of our current board is to try our best to apply the same rules to every homeowner. We encourage your thoughts and hope that in the future you will consider running for the board and continue to improve the great complex we are all a part of.