Rising expenses and reluctant residents challenge building maintenance and upkeep.
Love your gated apartment community, but hate the hefty monthly maintenance bill? Even as those in small apartment complexes get away with paying peanuts for common area maintenance, many owners are hit with bills that can run up to over Rs 5,000 a month for a 1,000 sq ft apartment.
Let’s look at what costs go into the monthly bill and the ways in which societies try to meet the expenses.
COMMON EXPENSES
Routine activities – cleaning, gardening, repairs and security – account for almost half the monthly budget. What makes it worse is that these services are getting costlier.
“Plumbers or electricians are not willing to do petty jobs,” says Rajesh Kothari, former secretary of Malwa cooperative society, Mumbai. Most societies are getting around this by keeping a resident handyman or outsourcing maintenance and housekeeping to third-party agencies.
This brings in a good measure of convenience and also lowers security risks. But on the flip side, the costs involved may be high.
Take security. Checking the credentials of security personnel are essential, but tricky and expensive.
Many associations instead use a security service provider, but costs are high. Says Kapil Kaushik, a member of the Golden Blossom residents’ welfare association in Bangalore, the monthly bill from their third-party security provider is a hefty Rs 3.5 lakh.
Apart from this, electricity bills for motors, lifts and common area lighting may also cross Rs 1 lakh a month in large complexes. Lifts may also elevate maintenance fees.
Kaushik says the annual service contract per lift in their apartment complex is over Rs 50,000. The monthly charges per home for the16 lifts that they have translate to Rs 150.
WATER CHARGES
Housekeeping bills aside, if your apartment is dependent on water supply through a tanker, monthly maintenance charges will shoot up. In apartments without city water supply or a borewell, water costs may run high. Kaushik explains that water costs for around 525 homes in his apartment runs to about Rs 2 lakh a month.
That is quite a cost to contend with. But what can hurt more is if your neighbour uses far more water than you, or merrily wastes water while you conscientiously turn off dripping taps or ration out your water.
Some complexes address this problem by having individual water meters for houses, enabling each resident to pay according to use.
UPKEEP
In addition to recurring expenses, there are also periodic expenses such as painting, re-laying of pavements and roads. Many complexes often find themselves short of resources for such large expenses.
In such cases, pooling ad hoc funds from the residents seems to be the best choice. For example, residents of Platinum apartments in Chennai pooled funds to pay for painting their building, as the society does not normally build a corpus for it. Kalyanaraman, a former secretary of the association, said that as only one block wanted to paint their exterior, they collected funds from within the smaller group. Others such as Golden Blossom collect Rs 5,000 twice a year to build a fund for such expenses.
CHALLENGES
But an apartment owner can throw careful calculations and collections off the track by refusing to pay up. Owners and residents alike do not want service-at-any-cost, and may hence pose a challenge when the apartment society needs funds.
In these cases, societies may raise monthly fees to have enough cash collected and may also charge fines to improve payment.
Besides, poor construction may lead to higher maintenance charges and conflicts between the society and the builder over finances are also quite common.
WORKING AROUND IT
Some societies find other sources of income. Kothari says that many societies in Mumbai earn rent on mobile towers set up on their terrace. Others may rent out common facilities for small functions or to shops.
Some employ part-time employees to save on personnel cost. Still others turn to online administrative tools, such as AppartmentADDA and CommonFloor to reduce costs further.
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