When you’re buying a San Francisco condominium, I hate to say it, but yes.

Chances are your real estate purchase may become one of your largest assets. So it would be wise to read all of your condo documents. A good agent representing you will read them too, and draw your attention to any red flags. Yes, quite a few of the documents are boiler plate-type documents, but there’s a lot of value there.

Here’s a quick guide to the most critical documents you’ll need to review when buying a San Francisco condo:

• The Sellers Transfer Disclosure Document (TDS) and the supplemental TDS (Sup TDS) will give you some of the best historical insights, directly from the seller
• The 3-R Report, produced by the City and County of SF, will give you an idea if any permitted work was done on the unit or building. It’ll give you great insight into the history of the condo you are about to buy
• The governing documents – Covenant, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&R’s), By-laws, and Building Rules – give great insight into a variety of topics (e.g. Can you lease out your condo? Are there pet restrictions? Can you wash your car on the premises?).

My favorite document is the 1 year of meeting minutes. It gives you insight into many of the intricacies of living with other people:

• How well people in the building get along?
• How well run is the building?
• what problems individual condos or the total building has had in the recent past?
• What type of corrective action as a group do they take?
• How they spend money? Are they a frugal group, or do they throw money at a problem to make it go away? Because some of that money is yours from your monthly dues.

Finally, take a look at the amount of reserves on-hand – and a Reserve Study if they have one – so you know what type of expenses you may be facing in the next few years, or possibly decades.

So as you can see, only by reading each document can you truly get a complete picture of your new, largest asset.

Image provided by gregoryjameswalsh