Tell me what you are looking for.
Tell me what you are looking for and which buildings you have your eye on, and I will send you what comes up.
How Buying Works
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01
The real monthly number
Before looking at anything: the loan, the property tax, and the HOA dues together. Downtown the dues are not a rounding error — in a full-service building they can be the largest part of the difference between two units at the same price, and what they include varies enormously from one address to the next.
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02
Which buildings can even be financed
A condo building has to satisfy the lender as well as you. Owner-occupancy ratios, reserves, litigation and commercial space all feed into whether a loan is straightforward, harder, or off the table — and whether the building is on HUD's approved list decides whether an FHA buyer can purchase it from you in five years' time.
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03
Seeing the right places
What holds up, and a straight answer about what does not: which lines get the afternoon sun and which get the freeway, which floors hear the street, what the building is like at eleven on a Saturday night as well as at two on a Tuesday.
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04
Through to closing
The HOA document review inside your contingency period rather than after it, the appraisal, the walkthrough, and the move-in the building will want booked in advance. This is the part people get walked through, not left to work out alone.
Downtown is not one market. It is a few hundred buildings, and the building decides nearly everything — what the dues are, what they actually cover, whether a lender will write a loan in it at all, whether the parking space is yours or the building's, whether the "loft" is a 1920s office floor with twelve-foot windows or a 2008 tower with a pool deck. Two units a block apart with the same square footage and the same price can be completely different purchases. I would rather spend the first conversation on the building than on the tour.
Licensed in California since 1993, in a market that has to be read one building at a time.
Mario Cabello, REALTOR® · CA DRE #01163184
