On disputes between condo owners and trustee/management...

I recently sold a condo where we've lived for the past ten odd years. Reasons are many-fold. We need more space for the kids, the price is good in this seller's market, and it's high time to cash out. Although I could easily hold onto the property and rent it out with very decent return yield, I'm just getting very tired of it all.

And so, when I read the New York Times story of the online entanglement and dispute between owners/residents and building board/management, I can totally relate to it.

In a building where more than half of the owners were absentee landlords, plus a majority owner who owns more than 40% of the units in the building, it's almost impossible to organize any meaningful challenge to upset the status quo because the existing trustees on the board were pretty much shoo-in, given the blessing of this one majority owner.

Things were not all that bad in the beginning, and no one bothered too much of anything, so long as snow is shoveled, garbage is collected on time. So everyone continued to pay the relatively high management fee, even though there wasn't much ongoing maintenance that the building should need to pay on a monthly basis. Given all the high management fees that we all paid into it, the condo association has almost no reserve, which did raise legitimate concerns as to where the money went. The budget was discussed in annual meetings, but owners were not given how much were actually spent and where it's spent, so it's impossible to discern if the budget is a good or necessary budget, or not. When questions were asked, the canned answer was always "we'll get back to you" but it never came, so that in a few months' time, no one would remember what questions needed to be answered.

It's only when a new owner started moving in, and she had more time on her hand, that she started looking and asking questions and gradually more owners (who lived in the building) started to come to. We started attending the owners' annual meetings. When reasonable questions were asked, trustees and condo managers tried either dismissed the questions as frivolous or unnecessary, with not so much as a "trust me on this" attitude to dismiss them all. Naturally that didn't go down so well.

Owners started organizing, tried the proper way to unseat the board, to no avail (thanks largely to the majority owner). Owners asked for details, and the condo management company's tactics were to nickel-and-dime every single request with high service charge to make us go away.

Owners, one by one, got tired of all these infighting. When the price is right, one activist owner after another sells. Eventually even this majority owner sold the stake in one block to another individual. After more than ten years, I got tired of it all as well, and I sold as well. The price is good, the time is right, and the new owners can fight their fight, but that will not be me.

Looking back, I wonder if it would have helped, had the owners had online tools and forums for organizing the efforts. With online forums going out to larger public, would it have added more urgency or necessity for the trustees/board to take the activist owners more seriously? It's naturally impossible to ascertain this kind of what-if.

I do learn one thing from this epic saga.

I've decided that I would not buy any condo (worse yet, co-op) in the future. I would only opt for freehold properties that I can make all the decisions. I'll be my own condo manager and trustee. I'll handle my own finances. I don't want to deal with this kind of messy infighting that I can't affect the outcome anymore.