[katiesue]

I also found the HOA minutes useful. A great way to see if there are any problems. Mine were farily ordinary and it seemed most improvements got approved. I also second Morri's looking around at other units to see how strict the HOA is. Mine seems fairly lax judging by everyone's patios.

Repairs - as others have said you have to pick and choose. I knew we wanted to repaint for instance so no use hassling about any of that. There are some repairs that are building code - I'm not sure if they HAVE to fix them but we did get them to fix those (an earthquake strap was in the wrong place on the water heater). I also compromised some as well. There is some dry rot on my patio doors. I got a $600 concession toward repair of that, it's not the full cost but it's part of it.

And I also second checking out the neighborhood at different times. My complex has absolutely no guest parking. Guests have to park on the street. The issue is it's a cul de sac so not so many spaces and there is a Church across the street. So Saturday around 5 and Sunday mornings - parking bites. The rest of the time it's not too bad. Luckily for me, well maybe not lucky, Madzers dad lives in the apartments that share the cul de sac. So I've been there at all kinds of various times dropping her off and picking her up so I knew exactly how the parking worked.

I had a really good Real Estate agent. I made an offer $40K less than it was priced at. We ended up at $20K less and it appraised for 5K more than I paid so I'm pretty happy with that. The other thing that's been wonderful with my Agent is she has a ton of contacts. I've only owned for a little over a week and I've already had it all painted, new celing fans installed, light fixtures and the dry rot door guy is coming next week. All arranged through my realtors contacts. And a friend's hubby does construction work and says I've gotten a killer deal price wise on getting this all done.