Difference between: apartment, condo, and house?

[WannabeWealthy]

All:

This is obvious, but I must ask because my friend gets offended when I call his condo an apartment. He has a mortgage, and he pays taxes, etc.. on the place, but it's attached to another condo and it's in a community where his parking is in a private parking lot (not belonging to him) with assigned parking.. He has a backyard, but it's still a community.

Anyway, he insists that his condo is a house. I don't recognize it as a house because a house means you can park your car anywhere on your property, it's detached, and it's on a main street and not in a community.

Is he right and I'm wrong?

-M

[chiver78]

hmm....I'd view an apartment as a residence where you pay rent to live, either garden-style, townhouse, or split. a house is a free-standing piece of property that you own and live in. a condo is anything that you own and live in that is not free-standing - garden-style, townhouse, unit within a multi-family, etc.

clear as mud, right? hope it helps your discussion some. tell your friend to lighten up. I refer to my townhouse condo as "my house" on occasion, but I recognize that I pay someone else for the overall exterior maintenance that I'd have to deal with on my own were I in my own house.

[wodehouse]

Call it his "home".

Anyway, a "house" and "apartment" are architectural definitions of structures. "Condominium" is an ownership structure.

[Apple]

To me, a house is free standing. If there are two attached together it is a duplex, not a house, and so on. You can rent a house or buy a house, but a house isn't attached to anything, except maybe a garage. I just call a condo a condo, but we don't really have them here. I honestly don't see why owning a condo is better than renting an apartment, but I'm rural so there are a lot of things I "don't get".

[Deleted]

And you can buy apartments.

And there are condos that are free-standing with their own parking places.

Semantics. It's home to the person who lives there.

[Deleted]

I would call it a townhouse.

[dcmetrocrab]

I've seen free standing single family homes in a common community be zoned as condos before. What your friend has sounds like a duplex/condo/townhouse.

[Cookies Galore]

It's his home, everything else is semantics. We rent an apartment and I call that home.
Friends of ours own a house, it just happens to be a rowhome. I'm not going to call it "second on the left in a row of seven" house.

[doxieluvr]

Feb 13, 2011 20:48:16 GMT -5 WannabeWealthy said:

All:

This is obvious, but I must ask because my friend gets offended when I call his condo an apartment. He has a mortgage, and he pays taxes, etc.. on the place, but it's attached to another condo and it's in a community where his parking is in a private parking lot (not belonging to him) with assigned parking.. He has a backyard, but it's still a community.

Anyway, he insists that his condo is a house. I don't recognize it as a house because a house means you can park your car anywhere on your property, it's detached, and it's on a main street and not in a community.

Is he right and I'm wrong?

-M

We have a townhouse, that I refer to as a house. We have a mortgage on it, all the maintenance is our responsibility, however we do not have our own parking.

DH calls it an apartment, because in the south it is typical for apartment complexes to rent townhouse style apartments for a fraction of the cost of where we live. I think he does it as a dig to me.

[cael]

Apartment to me implies paying rent to live there. House to me implies free-standing (although I refer to my apartment as "the house" usually), and condo implies owned but part of a complex and attached to other units. I know there are probably exceptions to all of that. Again, it's all in the semantics & people's interpretations.

[pepper112765]

I think the difference, particularly between condo and townhouse, is that a condo owner exclusively owns the unit but shares ownership of the structure and common areas. Condos owners can also be assessed extra fees on top of their regular fees to cover signficant repairs to the struture and/or common areas. As I am a townhome owner, all repairs to my unit inside and out are paid for by me. My HOA fees cover management fees, snow removal, landscaping, etc., of the common areas like the playground and the walkways. My assigned parking spaces are provided by the HOA. And, if the HOA fees are not paid, then that is the first thing they do is restrict the parking. Tow truck driver rides around every night.

[souldoubt]

Based on where I live I'd say:

-Apartments are attached units that you rent. However the line is blurred because many of the condos around here are the same except...

-Condos you can own (also rent obviously). Generally the one's around here though are on leased land which means you don't own the land and as someone else mentioned you have access to the common areas. Like an apartment you generally share 2 walls (unless an end unit and only share 1) and you might have someone above and/or below you. Some of the condos around here are converted apartments and when they say converted apartments I think it basically means that somewhere along the way they were "converted" to condos and they could be sold. The conversion didn't really mean anything was physically done with the property just the paperwork, leased land, etc so that they could be sold. You pay HOA fees and if you live in a HOA that is bad with it's money, doesn't charge enough or whatever you could be hit with extra fees when they need to do work.

-Townhouses don't have anyone above or below you, you own the land but you share at least one wall with a neighbor and might share two unless you're an end unit. Similar to condos you have common areas you share (maybe pools, bbq's, park, etc), you pay HOA fees and if the association comes up short they could come after all owners to get more money to make needed repairs.

-Houses are single family homes that don't share walls with a neighbor and you own the land. All repairs are on you as you obviously aren't a part of a HOA.

[973beachbum]

Feb 13, 2011 21:08:29 GMT -5 wodehouse said:

Call it his "home".

Anyway, a "house" and "apartment" are architectural definitions of structures. "Condominium" is an ownership structure.

Agree. If you say house or apartment you are trying to describe the structure and whether it is in a building as in a apartment or house as in freestanding or a row of them. If you say condo or co-op are ownership types. Either I could also rent or own and still live in it and consider it my home.

Personally if I live there whether I rent, own or squat it is my home. Everything else is irrelevant.

[Tiny]

Depends on how/when you are discussing his place of residence.
A friend bought a "condo" that was in a vintage apartment building.
I say I'm going to my friend's "house" to watch the Big Game. It's habit to use that terminology... when I was a kid we didn't differentiate between "let's not go to Mary's Apartment to hang out - let's go to Sally's house". House was interchangeable with "home". Saying I'm going to Mary's home sounds stilted/odd to me. Of course, if someone I knew who wasn't "from around here" said they were going to Mary's home - I'd cut them some slack (they aren't from around here) and would understand what they meant.

I say she owns a "condo" when asked about her living space (to denote that she "owns" property that's in a multi unit building and is not renting). Someone might ask me what kind of "condo" - like in a Highrise? Or in a "community" meaning a bunch of lo rise buildings grouped together - maybe with common area pool, tennis courts, etc. Or in a vintage building which would be a converted apartment building on a city street with perhaps single family homes on the same block...
And if I'm talking about the architectual details or the past of the building - I say it's originally an apartment building (it's possible that hundreds of people have called the various units "home" in the last 60 years...

When does your friend get offended? When after bar hopping you say "Hey, let's go back to your apartment and figure out who collected the most phone numbers?" or when telling someone what kind of living arrangement he has - "Yeah, Billy Bob lives in an apartment" which might mislead someone to believe he "rents" and that it's vary likely his address will change in a year (when his lease is up).

If you friend calls his "place" a condo then that's what you should call it...

[shanendoah]

As someone else mentioned, "condominium" is NOT a structure, its also not an "apartment" that someone owns. It is an ownership structure.
Our first house, which was most definitely, architechturally, a single family home, was an "open air condominium". This was because the land had been zoned for multiple family homes, not single family, and making it a "condominium" got around those zoning laws.
It also meant, that because techinically, all the land was owned in common (though you were responsible for maintaining your yard), there were no lot premiums, so we didn't have to pay extra for our bigger than average lot that backed to a green belt.
It is not something I would recommend, in general, as it was very confusing for people to understand. We, luckily, had a good friend who was a lawyer go over all the home owner covenants and stuff with us, so we knew exactly what was what, but I spent a lot of time explaining to the next door neighbors how things were supposed to work.

And as for someone who said you don't pay HOA on "houses", again, that's not necessarily true. Even in a regular single family home (vs the open air condo), and you're responsible for all maintancence, if you live in a planned community, you often have HOA dues. These are used to maintain common areas, like play grounds, as well as streets and sidewalks, because, in a planned community, all the common space is private land. The developer bought it all, then sold the houses to individuals and sold the common areas - playgrounds, streets, sidewalks - to the HOA. The city is not responsible for maintaining any of those public areas like they would be for a city park or city streets, so an HOA (with monthly dues) exists to provide for those areas.

[share88]

All houses in my city that are newer (built in last 20 years) are in HOAs. Cities do it so they don't have to maintain common areas, put in streets, etc.

[Deleted]

I would call his place a house. An apartment is a unit in a building, usually there are 4 or more units. Anyway, what does it matter. If it insults him to have it called an apartment, why do you need to?

[Deleted]

And I have no idea how you bring where he parks into it.