Pros and cons of having a pool and gym facilities in your apartment building

Summary:

Pros: In upmarket buildings where the facilities are large enough to cater for many people to use at a time – this then makes the difference and is worthwhile.

Cons: not often are the facilities good enough to cater for the number of people living in the building and the maintenance can become costly

Pools, gyms and tennis courts add to the amount of your Body Corporate fees annually and are facilities not often used and often need maintenance.

However, there are exceptions to the rule where there are high end buildings in Auckland that have superior facilities.

The major factor to consider is if the facilities are large enough to cater for the number of people in the building and would you use them. If this is the case, then it is worth your while paying the extra Body Corporate fees and may increase the value of your apartment.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Andrew Murray from Apartment Specialists. Is an apartment complex with swimming pools, gyms and tennis courts, do they add value or just increase your body corporate fees?

Now if I was going to give a generalised answer across the board, I would be saying they're a complete waste of money. There's always something going wrong with them. You never actually use them. I own several apartments and I live in an apartment complex, I never use it and the whole time I think of using it, there's someone else using it. So if I had a blank board again at the end, I'd say they're a complete waste of money.

Now there's always an exception to this rule and that's if these facilities are outstanding. For example, The Pullman, you've got a pool you can actually do laps in and you can actually sunbathe around the side. They usually take away the roof. Or in Metropolis, you've got a gym where you've got multiple machines.

The good way of looking at it is does the gym or the pool free, or would someone actually pay to use that as a stand alone. If they could, then that a small gym in itself, or a small pool in itself? And in that case, yes it definitely adds value, but otherwise it's just a complete waste of money.

Some examples of this is you'll see these apartments or these complexes that have these pools that are probably a couple of meters wide. Some are eight meters long and they're basically washing machines. I see a lot of them with these off the plan apartments, I'll give you an example is the Queen Residences. I saw the photos of how they're selling the apartment. I looked at the pool, and I said, "That would be great at my house, but not for 280 plus apartments."

Anyway, I hope that helps. You decide when you're looking at that apartment complex, does that pool or gym actually achieving or increasing the value or is it just going to cause you problems?

Cheers, bye!

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