Susie Ripp

Problems with property management companies releasing CIC documents

In Colorado, "The Colorado Real Estate Commission" approved sales contract requires (when there is a Home Owner's Association) the Seller or Listing Company to provide the buyer the following:

•· Owner's association declaration

•· Rules & Regulations

•· Minutes of the most recent annual meeting & minutes of any directors' meetings

•· Annual budget

•· Bylaws

•· Party wall agreement

•· Annual income & expense statement

Many Home Owner's Associations in Northern Colorado have property management companies that are paid to maintain the above documents. There is almost always a transfer fee that is charged to the new homeowner that ranges between $75 and $500 just to transfer ownership. This has nothing to do with obtaining the CIC documents. Some of the management companies charge the Realtor® or Seller as much as $360 to obtain the contractual required documents. These documents could easily be posted to a website. Some management companies provide this information at no charge. I don't think the average home owner knows that this is going on until they go to sell and find out there is a charge to receive these documents. By that time they are in a time crunch and ready to move on and don't care to waste time on more details.

Realtors in my area are beginning to network together and share this information to try and save the sellers from unnecessary charges. If there are 4 listings in one subdivision we can at least split the costs to the sellers.

I would love to hear others thoughts and experiences with this issue.

With 2007 closed, I thought these IRES statistics for Northern Colorado Sales information to be interesting:

Ft Collins median sales price for 2007 = $235,000 which is up 2.2%

Loveland median sales price for 2007 = $227,600 which is down 4.8%

Greeley/Weld County median sales price for 2007 = $89,900 which is down 2.6%

Longmont median sales price for 2007 = $240,000 which is down 1.0 %

Estes Park median sales price for 2007 = $189,900 which is down 2.6%