Should You Consider New Townhouses or Condos When Looking for Your First Home?

If you're looking into purchasing a home, you've probably seen ads for new townhouses or condos and wondered what the difference was. A townhouse is a type of single-family home that shares at least one common wall with another home. A condo is more like an apartment, with many units in a single building. As you can imagine, there are many similarities between the two types of homes.

Both townhouses and condos will give you access to shared spaces and amenities. Common exterior areas might be grassy spaces for barbeques or swimming pools, while other developments also have common interior spaces, like meeting rooms that you can reserve for your use. These developments or buildings will also be governed by a homeowner's association. Your homeowner's association (HOA) will have rules that will dictate things like whether you can have pets and if so, what kinds, as well as what the exterior of the home has to look like. You will also have to pay monthly or yearly dues to the HOA. The advantage of a HOA is that they often provide services to the common areas. Some HOAs also provide services to residents, like maintaining your front yard for you or clearing snow in the winter.

Where the two differ is in how much you're buying. If you buy a condo, you'll only own the interior of the unit, and perhaps have a stake in the development or building that the condo is in. If you buy a townhouse, you're buying the land, too, not just the home. Some townhouses also entitle you to a percentage of the total development, but this isn't true of all developments. See the best developments at this page: BWPark.ca.

Should you consider a townhouse or a condo instead of a detached single-family home? Price-wise, a townhouse or condo will usually be less expensive. Many experts argue, however, that this type of home presents more a challenge to those who want to sell the property in the future.

Is there a reason to choose a condo over a townhouse, then? If owning land is important to you, a townhouse is the right choice. If you'd rather not deal with yard maintenance at all, no matter how minimal, a condo is the better choice. Basically, if you like apartment living, a condo will be much the same as that, only you'll own the apartment in which you live. Townhouses, on the other hand, are more like single-family detached homes for those who want something with a bit more privacy. More facts can be found at the http://bwpark.ca website.