Vancouver housing market trends: 2 - Maintenance Fees

As a follow up to my previous post, here are my findings on comparing Maintenance fees and Area of an apartment in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver. The data set is the same one presented earlier, and consists of 24 apartments currently offered for sale.

Fig 1. Maintenance fees increase as the area of an apartment increases.

This data shows that maintenance fees (strata fees) generally increase as the area of the apartment increases (correlation of 0.76). This is significant because it substantially affects the size of mortgage you can have for a given income. Lower fees mean you can put more money each month towards paying the principle, and could potentially pay off the house faster.

It is also interesting to note that while this general principle shows increasing area is correlated with increasing fees, there is a bit of variance between maintenance fees for a given square footage. For example between 600 and 650 square feet you could pay as low as $195 and as high as $270 from the data set I am using. This means that you do have some choice in the fees you pay, if you choose the apartment carefully!

So where does this extra variance come from? I also took a look at age and maintenance fees to see if that might provide some more insight:

Fig 2. Maintenance fees are generally higher in older buildings

Actually, the effect here was not at all what I was expecting. I had heard terrible stories of buildings built between 1980 and 2000 leaking (wiki), and assumed that this era of building would have higher than average fees. But I guess the older buildings have more problems (or more cautious strata councils?) and tend to have higher fees (correlation of -0.46).