Industry Insights

Owning a condominium usually means sharing your walls, floors and ceilings with your neighbors. Most of these condominiums will be faced with problems like internal politics, neighbor infighting and power struggles stemming from the complicated network of condo boards, owners, investors, tenants and property managers.

In some buildings, the rule book governing what owners can and can’t do with their property can span 70 pages. Disputes over issues such as pets, squeaky floors and visitor parking spots are escalating into epic and costly court battles.

One that involves an unprecedented amount of shared space and collective decision-making. In condos, the old adage that “good fences make good neighbors” no longer applies. It is pretty hard to have a fence when you have to walk by a problem neighbor just to get to the elevator. The condo boom isn’t just reshaping our skylines; it’s changing how we live. Are urban Sri Lankans—long accustomed to detached houses and backyards—ready for a world where being a happy condo dweller means accepting that we’ll have to give up some of our personal freedom, and that our neighbors may always be too close for comfort?

• As a legal entity, the condominium (sometimes called “strata” in Singapore and some other countries) has existed in Sri Lanka for more than 40 years, ever since a boom in high-rise construction and innovations in property law essentially allowed developers to privatize the air space above the ground and carve it into small blocks that could be sold for profit. Many of the original condos were designed to encourage low-income population living in rental housing in big cities to embrace home ownership, while the middle class continued its inexorable march to the suburbs. The condo boom of the past decade has, however, been marked by a renewed interest in urban living, driven by increasing numbers of young professionals who want to live closer to where they work, along with a cultural and environmental backlash against suburban sprawl, with its commuter traffic and car-induced smog. The rising number of people putting off marriage and children, as well as seniors living longer, has also helped fuel demand for smaller homes.To understand how quickly we’ve shifted from detached homes to condominiums, a great majority of new home starts are condominiums (building more condos than single-detached houses).Toronto Canada has a dynamic red hot condo market compared to its neighbor to the South United State and other developed cities in the world. This has rapidly increased the condominium prices and attracted many investors from around the world. The shift toward condo living is both more recent and more profound in Canada than it has been south of the border in United States and in many cities in the world. In this Red Hot Condominium market has created Red Hot Problems too. It is imperative before you move in to your condo to make sure that your condo home is built and equipped according to your purchase and sale agreement. Once you have moved in you are nothing when it comes to battles with your condominium management council. They are little fiefdoms and each one has a king. Many of the people who get elected to the boards have time on their hands, and this is the only place in their world where they have power. Unfortunately, that starts to go to their heads.When you make complaints they can ignore and harass you in many ways and you will end up in court. When you file a lawsuit against the Condominium Management Council while you have to pay your legal fees, condominium council legal fees are paid by the Condominium Council Management fund.

  One of the biggest sources of conflict in condos stems from the fact that developers pitch buyers on the benefits of a worry-free lifestyle without all the responsibilities of home ownership. While it’s true that condo living usually means that owners pay maintenance fees so that someone else can shovel the driveway and mow the lawn, that act of sharing general household expenses with your neighbors creates its own set of responsibilities. The result is that most condominiums have been turned into corporations with their own shareholders and boards of directors responsible for multi-million-dollar budgets. Including the managing of Reserve Fund

  In some buildings, just finding enough owners willing to take on that kind of responsibility is a challenge. “You’re selling someone on a carefree lifestyle and then, in the same breath, you turn around and ask someone who didn’t want the responsibility of looking after a detached home if they mind looking after 300 homes,” says Tom LePage, a former condo property manager turned consultant in Collingwood, Ont. However, once they get into power, LePage says many condo boards end up operating less like businesses and more like mini-governments. Owners campaign for election to a volunteer board, raise taxes and set the rules for how other owners can behave—often going to great pains to police their neighbors.

  More common than neighbor disputes are battles between condo boards and owners over the growing laundry list of rules governing what owners can and can’t do with their property. Typically, when developers first build a condo, they write up a list of basic rules, running about two or three pages. Once responsibility for those rules is handed over to a condo board, however, that list can swell to anywhere from 20 to 70 pages, depending on the building and personalities involved.