A $61k chiller assessment I had no way to pass through

The chiller is the visible part of this. What made it expensive was buying a modified gross lease with no stop and treating it as if it behaved like a net lease. In a five-owner condo you're a minority vote on capital spending and your recovery depends entirely on lease language you inherited. I'd have wanted to know how the declaration allocates common element replacements too, since square footage share and equipment-benefit share aren't always the same thing and that varies by how the document was drafted. Did yours allocate straight by area?

Your $71k TI number is the part I'd stare at. Converting a podiatry suite to another specialty is where scope creep lives. The minute you open a wall for new plumbing you find the sink venting was done under a permit nobody can locate, and then you're pricing an accessibility upgrade to the restroom because you tripped an alteration threshold, which depends on your local code adoption. I've had a 4,000 sf medical fit-out go from $58/sf to $79/sf on exactly that chain. Did you carry a contingency or was $71k the bid?

This is the exact reason I've stayed away from condo interests, and I keep looking for the boring version that doesn't include a vote I can lose.

Two questions before I take my own lesson from this. What did the reserve study say, if one existed at all, and what was the voting threshold for a special assessment? If four owners can bind you on a capital item, that's a governance risk with a dollar figure attached and I'd want to see it modeled. Also curious whether the podiatrist ever asked you to contribute to imaging or anything on site, because the reason he left sounds like the more expensive fact in your post. Demand for the space is fine. Demand for your particular box next to a system that's building its own is a different question.

I hold things for twenty years and my rule is that I don't buy a specialized building where someone else controls the mechanical plant. Medical outpatient demand is about as durable as anything I look at, and I still won't take a fractional interest in a 1998 shell with four co-owners who each have a different time horizon. Your write-up is honest about the timing, though. Eleven months of vacancy on a single-tenant suite is normal, not bad luck, and anyone underwriting one of these should have that in the model from the start.