You found the perfect condo. Updated kitchen, walkable neighborhood, parking included. The mortgage payment fits comfortably in your budget. Then you see it buried in the listing details: HOA fees of $650 per month.
Suddenly that affordable home costs an extra $7,800 per year—forever. And unlike your mortgage, those fees will almost certainly go up.
The decision to buy a house with HOA fees is one of the most consequential financial choices homebuyers routinely underestimate. That monthly fee isn’t just another line item. It fundamentally changes the economics of ownership, your flexibility to weather financial storms, and sometimes whether buying makes sense at all.
The fee that never ends
Here’s what makes HOA fees different from almost every other housing cost: your mortgage has a finish line. Even a 30-year loan eventually ends. Property taxes, while permanent, at least build equity in your community and can sometimes be contested.
HOA fees are permanent operating costs that provide no equity, no tax deduction for most owners, and come with virtually no negotiating power. You pay what the board decides, when they decide it, for as long as you own the property.
The national median HOA fee sits around $200-300 per month according to data from the Community Associations Institute, but that number obscures enormous variation. Condos in major metros routinely run $500-800. Luxury buildings with doormen, pools, and gyms can exceed $1,500. Age matters too—older buildings with deferred maintenance often carry the highest fees, not the lowest.
A $600 monthly HOA fee over a 30-year ownership period totals $216,000 in today’s dollars. Factor in typical annual increases of 3-5% (a range consistent with historical HOA fee trends tracked by real estate analysts), and you’re looking at something closer to $350,000 over that same period. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a second house in many markets.
When the math quietly destroys your budget
Most buyers focus on whether they can afford the initial monthly payment. Mortgage plus HOA plus taxes plus insurance—if the number fits, they move forward. But this static calculation misses how HOA fees interact with your finances over time.
Your mortgage payment stays fixed (assuming a fixed rate). Your income, ideally, rises. This means mortgage burden typically decreases as a percentage of income over the years. HOA fees do the opposite. They rise faster than inflation, often faster than wages, and they rise regardless of your personal financial situation.
The buyer who comfortably affords a $600 HOA at age 35 may find the same fee—now $1,100 after two decades of increases—crushing at 55, especially if they’ve hit an income plateau or want to reduce working hours.
This dynamic particularly punishes retirees. Fixed income meets rising fees. It’s why the surprising case for renting in retirement deserves serious consideration for anyone eyeing a high-HOA property as their “forever home.”
The special assessment time bomb
Monthly fees are predictable. Special assessments are not.
When the roof needs replacement, the elevator requires modernization, or the foundation shows cracks, HOA reserves often fall short. The solution? A one-time charge to all owners, sometimes running $10,000, $20,000, or far more per unit.
You have essentially no control over when these hit or how much they cost. A board that’s been deferring maintenance to keep monthly fees artificially low might suddenly announce a $25,000 assessment. You can vote against it, but if the building needs the work, you’ll pay regardless.
Some buyers check the reserve study before purchasing—a document showing the HOA’s savings and anticipated major expenses. This is smart but insufficient. Reserve studies are projections, not guarantees. They assume current cost estimates hold, no unexpected failures occur, and future boards maintain funding discipline. None of these assumptions is reliable.
The practical reality: buying into an HOA means accepting open-ended financial exposure you cannot fully quantify in advance.
What you’re actually buying with those fees
HOA defenders correctly point out that fees cover real services. Exterior maintenance, landscaping, common area cleaning, insurance for shared spaces, sometimes water, trash, and amenities like pools or fitness centers.
The relevant question isn’t whether these services have value—they do. The question is whether the bundled cost represents good value compared to alternatives.
Consider a $500 monthly HOA fee covering exterior maintenance, landscaping, a pool, and a gym. If you owned a comparable single-family home, you might spend $100-200 monthly on equivalent exterior maintenance, $50-100 on lawn care, and $30-50 on a gym membership. The pool is harder to replicate, but unless you’re swimming laps regularly, its recreational value might not justify the premium.
The math often reveals you’re paying a significant convenience premium—sometimes justified, sometimes not. And you’re paying for services whether you use them or not. The resident who never touches the pool subsidizes the family there daily. The owner traveling six months per year pays the same as the homebody.
The governance problem nobody discusses
When you buy into an HOA, you’re not just buying a home. You’re becoming a minority shareholder in a small, often dysfunctional, quasi-governmental organization run by your neighbors.
HOA boards have extraordinary power over your property and your wallet. They can restrict rentals, mandate paint colors, impose fines for minor violations, and approve fee increases. While you technically have a vote, changing entrenched board dynamics requires organizing neighbors who mostly just want to be left alone.
Bad governance manifests in many ways: boards that refuse to raise fees until emergency assessments become necessary, boards that pursue vanity projects that spike costs, boards captured by residents with different priorities than yours, and boards that simply lack the expertise to manage complex building systems and contracts.
You’re betting your financial future partly on the competence and integrity of strangers who volunteered for an unpaid position.
How high fees destroy resale value
When you eventually sell, your buyer will do the same monthly payment calculation you did. And they’ll see that $700 HOA fee sitting alongside your asking price.
High HOA fees effectively function as a permanent price reduction for your unit. A buyer who can afford a $2,500 total monthly housing payment will pay less for your property than they’d pay for a comparable unit with a $300 fee—because your fee consumes more of their budget, leaving less for the mortgage.
This isn’t abstract. In many high-HOA buildings, prices have stagnated or declined even as the broader market rose, because fee growth outpaced buyer tolerance. The building that was competitive at $400/month HOA in 2015 struggles to move units at $750 in 2025.
The problem compounds if your HOA has known issues—poor reserves, pending litigation, or deferred maintenance. Savvy buyer’s agents flag these, and the most qualified purchasers walk away, leaving you negotiating with investors seeking discounts.
When HOA properties actually make sense
Despite everything above, HOA properties aren’t universally bad decisions. They make sense under specific circumstances.
If you genuinely cannot or will not maintain a property yourself, the forced bundling of maintenance has real value. Some buyers know themselves: they won’t clean gutters, they’ll defer roof repairs, they’ll let landscaping deteriorate. An HOA eliminates these decisions. That’s worth something.
If you’re buying in a location where HOA properties are the only option—urban condos, many retirement communities, some suburban townhome developments—the choice isn’t HOA versus no-HOA. It’s this building versus that building. Focus on comparing specific associations rather than rejecting the model entirely.
If you’re buying short-term and the monthly economics work, the long-term fee trajectory matters less. Someone planning to hold for 3-5 years cares more about current cash flow than 20-year projections. Though this intersects with other considerations—if you might move in that timeframe, buying at all requires careful analysis.
The calculation most buyers skip
Before buying an HOA property, run this comparison: what would equivalent housing cost without the HOA?
Sometimes the answer reveals the HOA fee is essentially buying you location. The condo with $600 HOA is downtown; the single-family home without any fees requires a 45-minute commute. That’s a real tradeoff with legitimate arguments on both sides.
Other times, the answer reveals you’re overpaying for convenience. The townhome with $400 HOA is two miles from a similar single-family home with $50 monthly in self-managed maintenance. The premium buys you little except constraints on your property rights.
The most dangerous scenario is buying the HOA property without realizing alternatives exist. Many first-time buyers, especially in competitive markets, fixate on their first approved offer without seriously exploring different property types. The mistakes first-time buyers make often include this tunnel vision.
A realistic decision framework
Ask yourself these questions before buying any property with significant HOA fees:
Can you afford the fee rising 50% over the next decade? Not comfortably afford the current fee—afford the fee after a decade of compound increases. If that number breaks your budget, you’re buying a time bomb.
Have you read the last three years of board meeting minutes? This reveals ongoing disputes, deferred maintenance, proposed changes, and the general competence of leadership. Boring homework, but irreplaceable.
What’s the reserve fund status and what major work is anticipated? A well-funded reserve reduces (but doesn’t eliminate) special assessment risk. A depleted reserve is a neon warning sign.
What percentage of units are owner-occupied versus rented? High rental percentages often correlate with lower maintenance standards and more conflict between resident-owners and investor-owners. It also affects your ability to sell—many lenders restrict loans to buildings below certain investor thresholds.
Could you rent this unit if you needed to move unexpectedly? Many HOAs restrict rentals or cap rental percentages. If you can’t rent, your exit options narrow to selling—possibly at a bad time in bad conditions.
The fee that should change your offer price
If you’ve done the analysis and still want the property, adjust your offer to account for the fee burden.
A simple approach: calculate the present value of HOA fees over your expected ownership period, then reduce your offer by some portion of that amount. If you expect $100,000 in fees over a decade, perhaps the property is worth $30,000-50,000 less to you than the sticker price suggests.
Sellers and their agents often resist this logic. They’ll argue the fee is “normal for the area” or that buyers shouldn’t “penalize” the property for necessary costs. Ignore this. You’re the one writing checks for decades. Your money, your math.
This negotiating leverage increases with fee size. Properties with $800+ monthly HOAs often sit longer on market precisely because the pool of buyers who can afford total monthly costs shrinks. Patient buyers can extract discounts that offset years of fee payments.
The opportunity cost nobody calculates
Every dollar paid to an HOA is a dollar not paid toward mortgage principal, not invested in retirement accounts, and not saved for other goals.
Run this thought experiment: if you bought a slightly less convenient property without HOA fees and invested the difference, where would you be in 20 years?
At $600 monthly invested earning 7% annually, you’d accumulate roughly $312,000 over two decades. That’s wealth that belongs to you, not an operating expense that disappears monthly.
The HOA property would need to appreciate substantially more than the alternative to compensate for this difference. Given that high-fee properties often appreciate more slowly—because buyers perpetually discount for the fee burden—this scenario is unlikely.
Some buyers counter that they wouldn’t actually invest the savings. They’d spend it on something else. This might be honest, but it’s not an argument for the HOA property—it’s an argument for building better financial habits.
The question you’ll face next
Buying a property with substantial HOA fees isn’t automatically wrong, but it demands more rigorous analysis than most buyers apply. The fee shapes your monthly budget, your long-term wealth accumulation, your exposure to unpredictable assessments, and your eventual resale prospects.
If the math works despite all these factors, proceed with clear eyes. But for many buyers, especially first-timers stretching to afford homeownership, high HOA fees transform what looks like an affordable purchase into a slow slide toward being house poor.
Once you understand the true cost of HOA ownership, a different question emerges: if you’re going to pay this much for housing, are you sure buying beats renting in your specific situation—or have you just assumed ownership is always the better path?