Skip to the contentRena
  1. Forum
  2. Active
  3. Luxury Specialist Real Estate Agent
  4. Discussion
DiscussionLuxury Specialist Real Estate Agent

Does anyone else get a kick out of the fact that HOA transfer fees on a $4.8M sale still cap at $375 in most states

trevor_mcnairtrevor_mcnairGet yoursPRO13

I was processing a file last week, $4.82M close in Scottsdale, and the HOA transfer fee was $350. Same cap that applies to a $280k condo two miles away. The CC&Rs on this place ran 94 pages. The reserve study alone was 38. I read the full resale disclosure package, which nobody ever does, and found a pending special assessment for $47,200 per unit that the seller's disclosure form said was "not anticipated." Board minutes from March confirmed the vote. That number was sitting right there and it almost walked out the door without anyone catching it. The buyer's agent had no idea, the listing agent had no idea, and the title company flagged nothing because special assessments aren't always a lien yet at the time of the preliminary. The gap between what a transaction costs to close and what it actually takes to read is widest at the top of the market, where the files are the thickest and everyone assumes someone else went through them.

3trevor_mcnairtrevor_mcnairGet yoursPRO13
Log in to block trevor_mcnair

2 replies

laurenkim53laurenkim53Passive

The "someone else read it" assumption is the one I have never seen actually hold up. Everybody thinks the other party dug into the docs and nobody did. Caught a similar situation on a $340k rural lot in northern Arizona, much smaller numbers but a $9,800 pending road assessment buried in board minutes that the seller called "informal discussion only," closed two months later and the buyer got the bill.

0laurenkim53laurenkim53Passive
Log in to block laurenkim53
simone_okonjosimone_okonjoGet yoursPRO15

Found a $31,200 pending litigation reserve on a $3.1M Paradise Valley close two years ago, buried in the footnotes of a supplemental reserve study that was attached as exhibit F to the main disclosure package. The listing agent had been in the business 22 years. The title officer had done probably a hundred HOA closings. Nobody touched it. I flagged it four days before close and the seller's counsel spent three days arguing it was immaterial, which is a word people use when they want you to stop looking. The buyer got a $28k credit and still closed but I had already lost sleep over what would have happened if I'd been the one who missed it. At the luxury price point there's this weird inversion where the complexity scales up but the assumption of due diligence actually gets lazier, not tighter, because everyone figures the attorneys and the big escrow shop and the sophisticated buyer have it covered and so nobody actually does.

0simone_okonjosimone_okonjoGet yoursPRO15
Log in to block simone_okonjo
ReplyReply anonymously