Quote:
Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper
The out of control costs in Toronto are in part to the regulations in building up a reserve and the luxurious services people expect but, don't really understand the costs. They obsess about pools due to their high replacement costs. Maintenance is at most a couple thousand a year. A doorman is $50,000 conservatively.
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I don't really care about the condo fees were I live (~$300/month), but the way the strata spends money and operates is annoying.
Our hot tub and pool are closed for most of the year for fear of high costs. 2 of the 3 people in charge of that decision do not use those facilities.
We have a security service that probably costs $80,000-90,000 per year now since they keep increasing the hours. People demand more security whenever something happens (break-in in house, garage, random crime nearby, etc.). The security guard has no discernible effect when it comes to preventing or mitigating crime or even helping people. A car was stolen from inside the garage after a 45-minute long break-in process while he was on duty. He's annoyed lots of people by doing things like shining flashlights into their bedrooms at night to check up on them. His main duty seems to be to kick people out of the common facilities when they close (the strata council is really worried about people being in the gym minutes past closing time). Most break-ins we have are ground-floor units where people left their doors unlocked or wide open.
We used to have a general handyman guy who managed to negotiate something like 15% annual cost-of-living adjustments to his salary. His main duty was to vacuum the common areas twice a month. I think we were paying him around $2,500 per vacuum job at one point. He damaged and destroyed a bunch of the tile in some of the common areas by using some kind of inappropriate cleaning machine on it.
We have a landscaping company that keeps planting things that die every few months and billing us for it. They come at 8 am multiple times a week to do leaf blowing even when there is no real work to be done. It's common to look down and see someone swishing back and forth with a leaf blower over a bare patch of ground for long periods of time.
Not catastrophic problems but annoying condo problems nonetheless. I think the trade-off is still okay since I don't want to personally manage the sorts of facilities we have here but I can see why people would prefer to live on their own private property.