Oakton Resident Bitter Wrote:
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> And yet nothing from our board one we
> pay $350 a month for I am not sure what!
You're paying for ~25 years of deferred maintenance on the Summit Square apartments.
When Orion Residential converted Summit Square to Four Winds of Oakton, they spent all the money on lipstick on a pig-type upgrades to convince the suckers that they were buying a Lexus when they really were getting a rebadged and repainted Kia.
On top of that, Orion bought in at the absolute top of the market, which started tanking right before they started selling.
Since they controlled the condo association board, they ignored residents' complaints about the decrepit stairs, choosing instead to slap a coat of paint over the rust rather than, y'know, actually fix them.
It got so bad that some of the condo residents called in the county, which threatened to condemn the property unless the repairs were made. Since Orion still had 40 units of the original 366 they'd bought, even after six years, they settled for $600K and transferred control of the board to the unit owners in March 2012.
Unfortunately, the actual cost of the stair replacement project was $1.4 million, meaning a special assessment for the unit owners.
You're still paying for that project, and likely will for many, many years to come.
Bonus: The conversion was
such a clusterfuck that eventually Dan Gumbiner, the president of Orion, moved into the complex from Illinois to try and keep the whole thing from completely blowing up. He was also president of the condo association when the county started making their condemnation noises.
Also, it looks like anyone who bought into Four Winds early got majorly shafted on price, with a lot of the units still valued at tens of thousands of dollars less than they were bought for over ten years ago.