I bought with a number in my head and the number was wrong before I even closed

The reserve study tells you what the board knows is coming; the delinquency rate among unit owners tells you whether the money will actually be there to pay for it.

What percentage of units in the Akron property are owner-occupied versus tenant-occupied?

The discipline you are describing has a name in underwriting: cost discovery before assumption-setting. Most people do it the other way, which is exactly what you did in Cleveland. The sequence matters because once you have a number in your head, every piece of new information gets filtered through it rather than used to build a fresh one.

The assumption doing the most work in your Cleveland deal was the implicit one: that the HOA's current financials represented ongoing costs. A reserve study tells you something different. It tells you what the board already knows is coming and has either funded or deferred. A thin reserve fund with deferred maintenance items is a forward cost, not a static snapshot, and it lands on owners whether or not they budgeted for it.

The risk you did not mention: this same pattern applies to the Akron duplex, though the structure is different. You pulled the reserve equivalent and called about pending assessments, which covers the obvious ground. What is harder to surface is deferred capital the current owner chose not to fund, systems at end-of-life that have not failed yet, and tenant situations that affect income timing after close. A sewer inspection catches one category of that. Roof, HVAC age, and electrical panel condition catch more, but the softer one is whether any current tenant is month-to-month on an informal arrangement that a new owner cannot simply continue.

The Cleveland condo is a clean teaching case precisely because the costs were findable. That is useful framing. The ones that are genuinely hard to find are worse, but you cannot build a discipline around them until you have closed the loop on the findable ones first.

For the Akron deal: did the sewer inspection cover the lateral to the street, or only the internal lines?

What you described in Cleveland is one of the most common and most expensive ways a deal goes wrong: the costs that exist and are findable, but only if you go looking. The HOA reserve study is exactly the document that tells you whether the building has been saving money for its big repairs, or whether those costs are going to land on owners as special assessments. A thin reserve fund with aging infrastructure is a bill waiting to be scheduled. You read the study backwards this time, and now you read it first.

The three items that got you, the HOA assessment, the special levy, and the post-close tax adjustment, all live outside the listing and outside a standard inspection report. They require separate asks: the reserve study from the HOA, the meeting minutes for the last two years (levies usually appear there before they are finalized), and a call to the county or city about pending assessments on the parcel. You did all three of those on Akron, which is the correction applied correctly.

The point you made about purchase price being almost the easiest part is one worth saying plainly to anyone starting out. Purchase price is visible and negotiable. Carrying costs, assessments, tax adjustments, deferred maintenance in common areas, those are the costs that determine whether your number at the end is what you planned.

One thing to confirm for Akron specifically: did the reserve equivalent you pulled cover the shared systems, or only the units? With a duplex the scope can vary, and the answer changes what you are actually budgeting for.

What did the sewer inspection come back with?