Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group
While they can limit what you can do with your property, CC&Rs usually have benefits as well. They can also prevent common neighborhood annoyances. The CC&R can keep your neighbors from blocking your parking space with a dumpster during a months-long construction project, digging a pool that encroaches on your patch of yard or adopting an army of noisy puppies (and then leaving their messes in the landscaping). In other words, pretty much nothing is off the table; it simply depends on the local standards. Because of them, condominium complexes and rows of townhouses often look nicer, are safer and maintain higher property values.
Rooftop maintenance may also be your concern. And while you might want to paint your townhouse in DayGlo shades, chances are about 120 percent that you’d have a homeowners association rep knocking on your door and telling you to tone it down, pronto, if you did. Under the wrong circumstances, they can be serious overhead. On the other hand, an HOA will also stop your neighbor from stealing your idea to go neon before you get the chance to. Find out before you buy whether that’s the case.
2: What’s the Insurance Situation? In some sets of townhouses, the HOA takes care of a portion of the insurance. Look into what types of disastrous situations are covered. Is flood damage on the list? If the tectonics or the water table in your area are a bit fussy, you’ll want to be protected, and those sorts of policies are often above and beyond the standard coverage. Whether they’re covering it or you are, you want to make sure your belongings and your dwelling are protected should something awful occur. In others, you’re on your own. How about harm from earthquakes? So it’s important to ask what the policies are and what you’ll need to do to insure your stuff should the worst happen.
It’s worth consulting your insurance agency to find out the specifics on your policy and beefing it up if you need to. It’s not just the parts of the home that your neighbors can see – a CC&R can specify who can live in your home, whether you have pets, what you’re obligated to do if there’s a pest infestation, whether you can hang a clothesline outside, and other aspects of your day-to-day life. 1: What’s in the CC&R? Covenants, conditions and restrictions (commonly referred to as CC&Rs) are rules that come along with living in certain communities. If you’re looking at a townhome, there’s almost certainly one for the property.
