Considering Moving to a Neighborhood With Amenities? Ask Yourself These Questions

When you're considering buying a house, there's a lot to think about. Obviously, you need to make sure you can afford your mortgage and that your neighborhood is in a convenient location. You also need to decide what kind of neighborhood you want to buy into. 

Different locations offer a wide variety of features, with some homes offering special amenities like community pools, playgrounds, and golf courses. If you are thinking about purchasing your place in a neighborhood with amenities like these, there are some questions you should ask yourself first. 

1. What is the cost of these amenities?

Nothing in life is free, and that applies to amenities in your neighborhood as well. If your neighborhood offers anything special, whether it's a park, playground, or pool, it has to be paid for. There's installation, maintenance, upkeep, and repairs to consider -- and this comes out of the pockets of people living in the neighborhood. 

Generally, neighborhoods with amenities have homeowners associations that collect the fees used to pay for all of the different features they're offering to homeowners. So, be sure to pay attention to exactly what fees you will owe each month. 

You should also learn the rules for when and how the HOA can impose added fees or special assessments to make major repairs or upgrades. If there's a problem with a shared community pool, for example, would everyone in the neighborhood be forced to send thousands of dollars in extra funds to the HOA to fix it? 

2. How often will you use them?

Having a bunch of amenities may sound nice, but consider whether your lifestyle would realistically lend to using them. If you hate to go out in the heat, for example, is it really worth buying into a Florida neighborhood with walking trails you're unlikely to ever use due to the warm weather most of the year? 

If you aren't going to regularly use the features the neighborhood has to offer, then it may not make sense for you to buy in the area and to incur the added costs. These costs include the HOA fees mentioned above, of course, but property values themselves may be higher due to the amenities, so you could also end up paying an inflated price for your house for community amenities you don't use. 

3. Who will be responsible for maintaining them?  

Finally, it's important to understand how the different amenities are maintained. In most cases, the HOA board will be in charge of doing this. But, some HOA boards are better than others. If the people in charge in your neighborhood mismanage things, the amenities could fall into disrepair and not be usable -- or you could get hit with a special assessment to fix problems the HOA allowed to develop. 

Be sure to learn as much as you can about how the neighborhood is maintained and whether residents have complaints, before you get a mortgage loan for a home that comes not just with costly amenities, but with a host of problems as well.