I think they're talking about the fact that you're required to pay condo fees to maintain your ownership of the condo, which does kind of make it a hybrid rental in a way. Obviously there's pretty good reasons for condo fees on some level (ignoring any mismanagement that may or may not be uncommon -- though sometimes the mismanagement is that they're too low), but it's something you have to factor in. You can never be completely free and clear with a condo that has fees.
I don't think there's a way of owning a domicile in any capitalist country without paying a membership fee (property tax) to the government. If you rent, you're doing that indirectly.
I mean, "homeowner association fees" are just condo fees for places that aren't apartments. They seem even less likely to go towards anything useful than condo fees do though.
But yes, that's true about property taxes. But since that's a commonality between condos and otherwise-individually-owned property it doesn't really matter. In a condo you pay both, but if you own outright you only pay one. In a rental you're kinda paying both combined, because the owner pays property taxes and then presumably also tries to extract profit.
Anyways, I don't agree that condos are a scam in the same way that timeshares are, and I don't think a condo is just a glorified rental (though the one condo I have owned in my life had absurdly high fees that I regretted getting myself into) or a scam like timeshares are. I was just trying to explain what I though the GP meant.
Condo home owners association control the fees. They go to insurance, money to replace common owned properly like the roof, exterior walls, paint, parking, landscape etc. You can go get elected and convince the board to not invest in these things and lower the fees. You can also vote to increase it to pay for things like to add solar.
Did you ever look HOA financial docs that details exactly what the HOA spent money on?
In the condo I owned? Yes, I became quite familiar with how the money was spent, and most of it was in principle logical for the building it was in, and the board wasn't doing anything unethical or anything like that.
It was, unfortunately, just a very bad situation for the building, which was aging poorly from its origins as a low unit count high value building with a lot of expensive amenities, windows that couldn't handle changing climate, a parkade that needed deep structural work, having been built when asbestos was in vogue, and a population that was once wealthy but was now largely on fixed incomes and declining property value.
No one did anything wrong (except maybe a few attempts to fix the parkade in overly optimistic and superficial ways that required re-fixing at more expense later), it just wasn't worth condo fees ballooning well past my mortgage payments and it ended up costing well hundreds of $k to sell and doing so was one of the most stressful times of my life.
None of that means "condos are always bad". Just this one was a mistake.
If you mean what I said about HOA vs condo fees, I've only ever seen HOA used for detached homes or townhouses, where the common concerns are a lot less critical than in an apartment building (and so, from what I know, tend to be more frivolous). But maybe it's used differently elsewhere.
Every condo I’ve owned the condo fees were controlled by the HOA. Sometimes we were members of two HOAs, one for the neighborhood and one for the condo complex.
Where I live if it's a condo the organization built around the unit owners is called a condo association or corporation. The principle is the same though. The board is elected by the unit owners based on ownership units and they manage or delegate management of things like fees and reserves and upkeep.
The main difference between a condo association and an HOA here is what kind of property is involved. But HOAs are also a relatively recent development here and aren't regulated as strongly so they vary more.
