About HOA-Fees.com
Buyers can research almost anything about a home before making an offer. HOA dues are the exception.
Price history, the property tax bill, the school district, the year the roof was replaced: all of it is a few clicks away. But on most listings the HOA fee shows up as a single number near the bottom of the page, with nothing to tell you whether that number is normal for the area or wildly out of line with the community next door.
That number deserves more attention than it usually gets. A $300 monthly difference between two otherwise similar condos works out to $3,600 a year, and unlike a mortgage it never gets paid off. It also tends to rise faster than buyers expect it to.
This site pulls the dues out of thousands of listings at once and puts them on a map, so you can see what an area actually looks like before committing to one community inside it.
Where the data comes from
| What | Source |
|---|---|
| HOA dues, list price, beds, baths, square footage, year built, property type | MLS listing data |
| Which homes are included | Homes currently for sale, plus homes sold in the last 12 months |
| ZIP code locations and county boundaries | The pgeocode and uszipcode open datasets |
| How current it is | Results are cached for up to 30 days per ZIP code |
Every fee on the map came off a real listing. Nothing is modeled, averaged in from a neighboring building, or filled in when the listing left it blank. Properties that reported no dues appear under the grey "no HOA reported" marker instead of getting a guessed value.
How the numbers are calculated
We lead with medians rather than averages. One penthouse listing with $2,000 dues will drag an average well away from what a typical buyer in the area would actually pay, so the map and the reports show the median along with the range between the 25th and 75th percentile.
Property type comes from the listing itself. Condo dues and single-family dues are not really comparable, because a condo association maintains the building while a single-family association usually just maintains common areas. An earlier version of this site guessed at property type using bedroom count, which turned out to be wrong often enough to matter, so we use the type the listing reports. Figures are also grouped into attached and detached housing, since sharing walls with a neighbor is what drives most of the difference.
Vacant lots are left out of the fee statistics entirely. A lot sometimes carries an assessment, but it maintains no building and has no square footage to measure against, so including it would skew the numbers for every real home around it.
What this data cannot tell you
There are real gaps here, and they are worth knowing about before you lean on anything on this site.
- Only listed homes are visible. If nobody in a neighborhood is selling, that neighborhood shows few results or none at all. That is a gap in what we can see, not a finding about the area.
- Fees are self-reported. They come from whoever wrote the listing, errors and omissions happen, and nobody audits them.
- Association financials are not in listing data. Reserve balances, operating budgets, delinquency rates, pending special assessments, and active lawsuits are not published anywhere a tool like this can reach.
- Neither is fee history. We show current dues. Whether they jumped forty percent last year is not something a listing records.
A low fee is not automatically good news
Associations that keep dues low are often the same ones that end up billing every owner thousands of dollars when the roof or the elevators finally need replacing. Underfunding looks like a bargain right up until it doesn't.
Use this site to work out what is normal for an area. Then ask the seller for the reserve study, the current operating budget, and the last two years of board meeting minutes. Those three documents will tell you more about an association's health than any amount of listing data.
How to use it
Search a ZIP code or county on the map to see individual listings and their dues. If you want the analysis written up for one specific area, with percentiles, property type breakdowns, and comparisons against neighboring ZIP codes, there is a ZIP code report for that. The guides cover the background: what dues pay for, why they vary so much, and what to check before buying.
Corrections and contact
If a fee looks wrong, send it over and we will check it. Questions, corrections, and data problems all go to support@hoa-fees.com.