Hi. I’m Cliff Unruh. Together with my wife, Melody, we own unit 401. Since my name and phone number are on the bottom of our Announcement of Special Meeting and other communications, I have received phone calls from concerned owners. The other day I received a call from an owner who lives out of state and had purchased her condo 6 months ago because she had plans to move to Texas. Her plans changed but now she is more than just a little mad. She said, “thanks to that dues increase, the value of my condo just went down. I can’t sell it now, unless I want to take a loss.” About a month ago I heard a similar complaint that a particular upstairs unit “fell out of escrow because of the dues increase.” I’ve heard arguments to the contrary from the minority of owners actually defending the increase saying that there is no connection between monthly dues and resale value. However, in visiting with a real estate agent yesterday, I got hit with the facts:

With today’s interest rates, each $100 of monthly mortgage payment will buy about $15,000 worth of residential property. In calculating just how much of a monthly payment a buyer can afford, the bank must include the monthly condo assessment because it is a contractual monthly obligation. For the sake of discussion, everyone’s dues went up somewhere between about $100 to about $150 or so per month. In mortgage terms, that equates to the equivalent of $15,000 to $22,550 in lost market value. “Lost?” In real world terms, YES. If you are thinking of selling because of the dues increase (or for any other reason), you are most likely not to get what your unit was worth before the increase…unless you are lucky enough to find a cash buyer or someone more than qualified for the mortgage. Our dues average about $100 per month more than another condominium association in Walden of about the same age (1979-1982). Again, applying the same rule of thumb that means that in the “Condo Marketplace,” our condos have a marketability that is about $15,000 per unit less than our neighbors’ down the street. This is what happens when a non-elected board, not answerable to the owners, makes poor management decisions and does not take into consideration the full impact of their actions. They forget that they are messing with people’s lives. “Messing?” Yes. When decisions of that magnitude are made without following our By-Laws and certainly without warning the Co-Owners of the financial situation, there can be no other more descriptive term.

On Saturday, October 21, 2023 we will change that with YOUR help. In fact you can help right now. How? Fill out and sign the proxy form (click on “Home” and go to the top of the page). With that completed proxy, you have helped to guarantee us quorum. We need no less than 40% of the Co-Owners represented either in person or by proxy at that meeting for us to move forward with our agenda. Every single one of us plan to be at that meeting but every single one of us has signed a proxy. You need to sign one too. It is the only way to guarantee that we will prevail. Look at it this way. That little proxy form is worth between $15,000 and $22,550 if we are successful and can bring fiscal responsibility and accountability back to the 18th at Walden.