Fifty units, gone. On August 2nd, a six-alarm fire tore through a Foster City condo complex built in 1981, with no fire sprinklers.

It’s a tragedy first, and our hearts are with the families who lost their homes. But if you own a condo on the Peninsula, a fire like this does more than displace the people who lived there. It starts a clock on the cost of owning every older condo around it.

Many owners are quietly asking the same thing right now.

Is it time to sell before those costs catch up?

The honest answer isn’t the same for everyone, and history tells us exactly how this goes.

California doesn’t leave a tragedy alone. When a Berkeley balcony collapse killed six people in 2015, the state answered with a permanent balcony inspection law on every condo in California, the first due by January 2025 and a repeat every nine years. If that inspection turns up repairs the reserves can’t cover, owners get a special assessment, and a newer law now makes the report a required disclosure to buyers. Tragedy, legislation, then a bill that lands on condo owners.

Your costs are already climbing. The mandates already on the books are being rolled back, because they’re brutally expensive. San Francisco just paused its own high-rise sprinkler mandate for five years, after owners faced bills of $60,000 to $300,000 per unit. But one cost is climbing no matter what the legislature does. After a total loss like this, insurers reprice every older, wood-frame, no-sprinkler building nearby, and premiums on those buildings are already jumping 15 to 30%. That flows into your dues.

Rising dues shrink your buyer pool. It isn’t opinion; it’s how mortgages work. When someone applies for a loan on your condo, the lender counts the HOA dues as part of their monthly debt, so every $100 a month in dues knocks roughly $15,000 to $20,000 off what they can borrow. A special assessment pushing dues up $600 a month can erase around $100,000 of their purchasing power. It can get worse than that.

If your reserves fall below the level Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now require, heading from 10% of the budget toward 15% in 2027, your building can go non-warrantable, and buyers can’t get a standard conventional loan on it at all. You go from a full market down to a small pool of cash and specialty-loan buyers, and that shows up as a lower price.

Whether to sell depends on your building. Here’s where we push back on the panic, because this isn’t everybody sell. A well-funded building that’s already done its balcony work and holds strong reserves may be just fine, even more attractive as the weaker buildings around it struggle. The one to get ahead of is the exposed building.

Run your building through four checks.

• First, your reserve study: if reserves are under about 50% funded, a special assessment is likely coming.
• Second, your balcony report: did the inspection find repairs that still aren’t funded?
• Third, your insurance: has your master policy been non-renewed, pushed onto the FAIR Plan, or hit with a big premium jump?
• Fourth, warrantability: is your building at risk of dropping below those Fannie and Freddie thresholds?

One or two, and you have time. Three or four, and yours is the building buyers will underwrite more carefully.

Know your exposure, then decide on facts. Listing before the costs fully land and the buyer pool tightens is a call to make with your specific numbers, not a headline. Send us your building, and we’ll review the reserve study, budget, insurance, and balcony report, and tell you straight whether it’s a sell-now situation or a hold.

We’d rather you make the right call than the fast one. Call or text us at 650-274-3598, email us at Burt@RealEstateBurt.com, or visitRealEstateBurt.com. Whichever way, you’ll know where your building stands.