Who manages a condo building?
In a small condo building, let’s say 2 to 4 units, who manages the building after all the units are sold? Does a management company do it? Is it the original developer? Does the unit owners take on the responsibilities? What about in a larger building with 50 to 100 units? Does the developer still…
In a small condo building, let’s say 2 to 4 units, who manages the building after all the units are sold? Does a management company do it? Is it the original developer? Does the unit owners take on the responsibilities? What about in a larger building with 50 to 100 units? Does the developer still manage (and still profit?) the building, or is it turned over to a management company? Thanks for your comments.
Ok..let me be clearer. PSF for basically billing, attending board meetings every 6-8 weeks, taking calls from owners 24/7 and preparing monthly financial documents.
No law, accounting or charges for maint staff. Im talking about strickly admin/mgmt stuff. 53 cents psf. For 32 units thats 625 per unit per year.
625 per unit or 53 cents PSF. Each unit has its own hvac and building has an elevator. These things dont affect a mgmt fee.
There isnt an easy boilerplate way to do this other than keep comparing PSF values.
Im starting to beleive that a good PSF charge is about 20 to 25 cents PSF
Wouldn’t it make a difference on what the facilities are? Our building has an elevator and each unit has it’s own central AC – and supposed to be a somewhat “luxury” building – this would have some impact on the costs as well
There are different types of management, such as full service or limited service. My 8-unit condo pays $500. a month for basically, billing, invoicing, and paperwork. We use one of the management company Supers (they have insurance, etc. through the management company) but we pay $350. per month for the Super (three days of trash and a weekly cleaning (sort of) of the common areas. The management company will recommend service and contractors, but we pay for the work. We’re not happy with the service we’re receiving, and we are definitely overcharged. We’re looking into self-managing. Any advice?
Kdabrowski:
Is the $237 per month ($2,844 per year) a total for just for the maintenance person or for your management company?
We pay $237 a month. The building has 8 units…about 10,000 -12,0000 sf in total. A maintenance person comes twice a week. This was average for a small building with no amenities.
The per foot calculation is interesting but you have to factor in economy of scale. I think I might develop the same report for a 10 unit building as I would for a 100 unit building. This takes the same amount of time. Getting 3 bids to repair the roof of a 4 unit building takes as much time as it does to repair the roof of a 50 unit building…and so on. Try comparing on a per unit basis since each unit represents, typically, at least one finacial transaction per month.
Check out the Cooperator. It’s free.
7-10k a year is a pretty wide difference. If the average 5 story brownstone is 5000-7000 square feet in size your paying almost a dollar per square foot.
On West 13th street in manhattan, a 250,000 square foot luxe building pays about 17 cents PSF. My uilding at 37500psf pays 53 cents.
A company that gave me an estimate turned out to cost about 31 cents psf. The problem with the industry is that all companies use different standards.
Im trying to figure out some standard to measure value by.
It would depend on the size of your building. Call around to management companies and ask them for a number. When my building was researching using a management company a few years ago, I think they were going to charge us between 7-10 grand a year. This is for a 5 story brownstone. We elected to self manage and put our money into improvements.