Who owns limited common elements

Email required. Question or Comment required. Sign me up for CAI's Community newsletter. Thousands of your peers are sharing advice. Subscribe Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team. Your email will never be shared with another person or place. Next ». I understood this when I put an offer in on the unit and confirmed it when I read the condominium documents prior to closing.

But the maintenance issue was something I never thought about until we were recently doing some capital improvements to the building exterior, which we were paying for via a special assessment on the unit owners, and a question arose over who should pay for repaving the parking area. One of the unit owners agreed with me, but the other unit owner insisted that I be required to pay an equal share.

I scoured the condominium documents, and they were silent on the question of maintenance of limited common elements. Except to the extent that the condominium instruments provide otherwise, any common expenses associated with the maintenance, repair, renovation, restoration, or replacement of any limited common element shall be specially assessed against the condominium unit to which that limited common element was assigned at the time such expenses were made or incurred. The Virginia Condominium Code Section The Maryland Condominium Act is a little bit different Section b 2 ii :.

If provided by the declaration, assessments for expenses related to maintenance of the limited common elements may be charged to the unit owner or owners who are given the exclusive right to use the limited common elements.

Check out the new closeitapp. How frustrating!! But unlike other common elements, the use of a limited common element is restricted to only certain unit owners. While ownership is shared, use need not be. The resident of a unit assigned a limited common element can refuse to allow anyone else to enter, use, or alter it under most circumstances, just as though it was part of the unit itself.

A few communities have elevators, parking areas, or amenities which are allocated for particular buildings or clusters of units. Unless the declaration says otherwise, ducts, wires, bearing walls, and similar fixtures which straddle a unit boundary are limited common elements to the extent they serve only one unit.

Also, windows, shutters, exterior doors and doorsteps, porches, patios, balconies, and other features designed to serve a single unit although located outside its boundaries are also limited common elements unless the declaration says otherwise. Converting an existing common element into a limited common element can be accomplished under the normal procedures for amending the declaration.

Unit owners who have limited common elements are also generally free to reallocate them amongst each other by signing an amendment to the relevant portions of the declaration, which the association must accept and file in the land records.