Buying and Selling our Condo (Our Big “Little” Move, Part 2)

When my husband and I bought our brand-new condo in Davis, California in 2019, the move made sense to a lot of people in our lives. We were empty-nesters in our late 50s, our youngest child having left home for college in 2014. The four-bedroom home we’d purchased in 1998 and where we’d raised our kids was more than we needed and was getting older. Our dog had died in 2018, so we didn’t need a yard as much anymore, and speaking of yards, neither of us was particularly into yard work, gardening, or home maintenance and improvement. Perhaps most importantly, we love traveling and intended to do a good deal of it as we headed into our 60s and eventual retirement. The “lock and leave” aspect of condo living appealed to us a great deal.

We bought a lovely 3 BR, 2.5 flat on the top floor of our four-story building. We purchased the unit early enough in the building process that we got to make most of the design decisions, and we added some great upgrades. We’ve enjoyed living there and have an active social calendar with the neighbors.

So why, not quite seven years later, are we selling the condo and moving back to a single-family home? I shared some of the reasons for our house purchase in my previous post, but here I’ll elaborate specifically on why we’re pivoting away from the condo.

1. The HOA fees. We pay into two HOAs, one for the larger development in which our condo buildings are located ($122/month) and one for the condo community itself ($632/month). When we first moved in, the total for both was around $500/month; now it’s a little over $750. They will go up 5% again in 2027, and regular increases are likely, even though the HOA is generally well run. (I should know–I’m on the board!) Multi-story condos with elevators and gated garages need maintenance and repairs, and that stuff just costs money, more all the time.
2. Construction concerns. I’ve been on the board twice (2020-22 and 2024-26), so perhaps I know too much now about “how the sausage is made.” The units are still fairly new, but the builder made a major settlement with the HOA several years ago for construction defects. We have been worried for a while that the units and buildings will not age well and have talked about 5-10 years of ownership as being kind of a sweet spot for us–not such a quick turnover that it’s financially irresponsible but leaving before any major problems really started surfacing.
3. Lagging resale values. This has been a pretty big surprise. Davis has a tight housing market with a slow-growth measure on the books, and usually homes in Davis gain value and sell quickly. There are really no properties like our condos in town. Our agent who is representing us in both buying the house and selling the condo is the expert in town on these condos (that’s why we picked him). He thinks they built too many of them (there are eight buildings with a total of 120 units). Yes, there are buyers interested in this kind of property, but not enough for the market.  And, of course, the HOA fees are daunting for many prospective buyers.

So despite our enjoyment of condo living in general and our community and unit in particular, we’d started looking around. The primary reason, as I said before, was that a single-family home with a yard and a guest cottage meets our family’s needs for the upcoming years–not to mention my strong desire to be a dog mom again(!). But as a financial matter, we remained concerned about the above issues and feared that if time passed, they could get worse. For example, Davis will have a measure on the ballot in June allowing for more new housing–which it desperately needs–which if passed could put even more pressure on the local resale market in the next few years.

When we found our new home, we started making plans to sell the condo. We were worried. The Davis market in general has been slower than normal over the past year (for economic reasons I’m sure I don’t need to enumerate), and other condos in the community have lagged on the market for months, usually only selling after several price reductions. This included our neighbor two floors below us–same floor plan/size, same view–whose unit took a long time to sell last year. We were ready to consider keeping the condo as a rental if a reasonable resale option didn’t work out in the coming months but hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Then we got lucky. The original plan was to get the condo on the market immediately after we move into our new home on May 13, catching the spring/summer selling season. But our realtor mentioned that he had clients looking for a unit like ours and that he knew of two other agents who similarly had interested buyers. Would we be open to off-market showings? Sure, we said. So he quickly lined up the inspections, we agreed on an asking price, and he scheduled three showings for a weekend we were out of town. Within 24 hours of seeing our unit, one set of buyers made a full-price offer with no contingencies, which we happily accepted.  Our selling price equals the top number that any of the units has ever sold for–and that previous high was three years ago.  The buyers are moving from New Jersey to California to be close to their son and grandchildren, who live in Davis, and they don’t need the condo until the end of May, so we can move out on our schedule and have the place ready for occupancy with no stress.

What made our unit sell so quickly? Though there are maybe 5-10 other condos in our community currently on the market, ours was the only one that has the largest floor plan. We’re on the top floor, which is more desirable for many people. (It certainly was for us–after decades in houses, we didn’t relish going back to our student/newlywed days of having neighbors tromping around overhead.) We also have unobstructed views to the west (incredible sunsets!) and the south, which most buildings don’t have. It helped that our buyers had been looking for a year at our condo community, just waiting for the one they wanted to come on the market. When they saw it, they didn’t dally, just as we didn’t when we finally found the house that checked all our boxes.

Maybe we could have done even better if we’d waited and put the condo on the market, perhaps sparking a bidding war, but we felt that a fast, no-drama sale at our asking price was good enough for us to move on with our lives. We’ll end up with a profit of almost $70K (from what we paid in 2019). We came out much better than our previous neighbors had, and we’re grateful and mainly amazed at how quickly and easily this all happened.