I fix the HVAC here every week, and now they've offered me two of the cottages

On the pool of renters. Age restricted turns over less than conventional, meaningfully less. I manage a handful of units in a 55-plus and my average tenancy is somewhere north of four years against about 20 months on regular single family. So you get fewer applicants per vacancy and you get vacancies far less often, and the second one is worth more than the first costs you.

What does change is the service expectation. Your residents are home during the day and they will call you. Solder, you already do the HVAC so you know what that looks like, but budget the phone time, not just the parts.

And get the HOA's collections history. A community with deferred maintenance and an underfunded reserve raises dues, and at $410 you have a long way it can go.

Ask for the reserve study. Most associations have one and if this one doesn't, that tells you something on its own. The clubhouse and the pool are the expensive items and they age on a schedule you can look up.

55-plus and 62-plus still trip me up every time I try to pin them down. Are those two different rules or is it the same thing written differently? solder, does your community say which one it is anywhere in the docs, because that seems like something you'd want to know before signing.

juniper, they're different age thresholds under the same older-persons exemption and the community has to pick one and operate consistently with it, with the 55 version carrying the requirement to document that most units have an age-qualified resident. Which one applies here will be written into the recorded declaration, not the marketing brochure.

solder, pull the recorded declaration from the county, not the copy the developer hands you. Recording practice varies by state but the recorded version is the one that governs, and I've seen a developer's PDF be two amendments behind.

Slightly sideways question. You're already in there every week. Is there a business in being the guy who does the small stuff for the owner-occupants too? Grab bars, filters, the things people used to do themselves. That community has a hundred-odd households aging in place and a maintenance-free promise the HOA only half covers. Might be worth more to you than the second cottage.