The idea that housing outpaces inflation is an absurd concept to me. Housing, food, medical care, transportation and education are about the only 5 things that matter when it comes to inflation....
The idea that housing outpaces inflation is an absurd concept to me.
Housing, food, medical care, transportation and education are about the only 5 things that matter when it comes to inflation. And three of those constantly "outpace inflation" by a very large margin.
Most everything else is shiny baubles of distraction.
Why is it absurd? It’s not strange at all that it’s the case. For one, inflation is a weighted index composed of multiple categories. If housing costs are driving overall inflation to increase,...
Why is it absurd? It’s not strange at all that it’s the case.
For one, inflation is a weighted index composed of multiple categories. If housing costs are driving overall inflation to increase, definitionally the housing costs are higher than inflation as a whole - that is what happens you multiple something by a percentage.
Secondly, “inflation” as Bloomberg is using it is the national average for the US. There is no reason why prices in NYC would exactly equal the national average. In fact, as one of the highest CoL areas in the country, a priori you would expect this to be the case.
That's because you don't spend 100% of your money on that one bill. It's a common misunderstanding of weighted indexes I see all the time. You see that food related inflation was, say, 5% and then...
Personally, I've felt the same thing in Europe. I keep hearing news about how inflation was x%, yet my monthly bills far outpace those x%.
That's because you don't spend 100% of your money on that one bill. It's a common misunderstanding of weighted indexes I see all the time. You see that food related inflation was, say, 5% and then you look at the cheese that you're holding in the grocery store that went up 20% and wonder how it could be. Well, do you spend ALL of your food expenditures a month on just cheese? I would hope not. You're biased to notice change, as a human, and when the lettuce cost the same as it always does it goes in one ear and out the other.
The second is yes, you are not representative of the exact weighted average of items the CPI composed. That is basically impossible. Not just location, but precise spending habits determines what your exact mixture would be. To add anecdata, I don't think I've even seen 5% inflation on my expenditures. So there you go, if you have, two sides across the model average.
Third, news articles, like the one we're under, will absolutely hunt for any kind of supposed mismatch possible, because that's what meets the baseline for a headline now. "Inflation at X US city matches US inflation" is a headline only the onion would post.
Because in that example, the bill is just one element of composite spending. Humans are naturally biased towards noticing differences, and that causes everyone's view to be naturally distorted...
Because in that example, the bill is just one element of composite spending. Humans are naturally biased towards noticing differences, and that causes everyone's view to be naturally distorted towards change unless you do some careful accounting.
Again, if you are tracking expenses carefully, then it boils down to natural differences between the national average and your expenditure. One is regional - the NYC-NJ Food Away from Home YoY inflation was 6%.
But even then, you probably notice a higher rate of price increase at the restaurants you'd frequent, as a hypothetical manhattan resident. The "average" person represented practically cannot exist - they would consume food at every restaurant in the NYC-NJ area, at levels proportional to their sales. But that is to say, your favorites may be going up higher, but in terms of a regional inflation level, you need to factor in the halal carts, and 2 star google maps review hole in the walls, and McDonalds.
But I will claim that pretty much everyone I know reports higher spending than what official inflation figures imply — and in some cases, that's with trying to spend less, for example on high-end groceries.
Well, everyone I know has seen below inflation levels of expenditure increase, so in the field of anecdata, the field is even, then.
@douchebag is quite right that's kinda what I was getting at. I found the relevant weight data, and I find it....quite odd. I have many thoughts but I don't have time to gather them well. Maybe if...
@douchebag is quite right that's kinda what I was getting at. I found the relevant weight data, and I find it....quite odd.
I have many thoughts but I don't have time to gather them well. Maybe if I find the time later this week I'll take a stab at a tildes-blogpost with an "everyman analysis"
But one thing that immediately jumps out at me is that rent costs have a weight of 10.267 an "owners equivalent rent of primary residence" has a weight of 20.619. Considering those things have roughly equivalent value (to the consumer), having them weighted so drastically different definitely throws some red flags...especially since I would expect the rent to shift far more dramatically YoY than "owners equivalent rent".
The cost of a cable subscription is weighed higher than my health insurance. And I spend more than 6x the amount of money on my health insurance.
Why? In the US, 68% of households own the home they live in. That seems about right for the weight, then (should be a roughly 2/3rds to 1/3rd ratio). Remember that the majority of Americans are...
But one thing that immediately jumps out at me is that rent costs have a weight of 10.267 an "owners equivalent rent of primary residence" has a weight of 20.619. Considering those things have roughly equivalent value (to the consumer), having them weighted so drastically different definitely throws some red flags...especially since I would expect the rent to shift far more dramatically YoY than "owners equivalent rent".
Why? In the US, 68% of households own the home they live in. That seems about right for the weight, then (should be a roughly 2/3rds to 1/3rd ratio).
Remember that the majority of Americans are either 1) get insurance from their employer or 2) are covered by medicare. If you are self employed, and pay for your own insurance, then yes, absolutely your expenditures vary more on the price of insurance, as it should, because you are not like the average american.
My last year's health care expenditure was $0: my health insurance is fully paid for by work, and every visit to a doctor was fully covered with no copay. So I paid infinitely more for streaming services than I did for healthcare. For me, this is drastically overrepresenting the care of healthcare.
We're both Americans, and we both count as one point in the 330 million population average.
Just because your employer provides the insurance doesn't mean you're not paying for it. It's just that they've removed that money from your pay and added it to a different bucket. Employers have...
Just because your employer provides the insurance doesn't mean you're not paying for it. It's just that they've removed that money from your pay and added it to a different bucket. Employers have no business providing healthcare for their employees anyway (though yes this is a major tangent). The only difference between you and me (other than that your plan is nicer than mine) is that I see the true cost of the expense.... $675 from me, + $1,800 from employer.
Why? In the US, 68% of households own the home they live in. That seems about right for the weight, then (should be a roughly 2/3rds to 1/3rd ratio).
The more important question is: Why is it that the functionally same thing is weighed differently just because the proportions of how that thing is acquired is different? It'd be like having separate categories for "Apples purchased with cash" and "Apples purchased with credit card".
The only "advantage" that I see is that the owner rent will rise much slower because rent goes up every year while owner rent only goes up when the owner moves or refinances.
Sure, but you can't gather data on how much the employer didn't pay you. It'll show up in the statistics for annual income, then. I don't want to get too sidetracked, but there's plenty of...
Sure, but you can't gather data on how much the employer didn't pay you. It'll show up in the statistics for annual income, then.
Employers have no business providing healthcare for their employees anyway.
I don't want to get too sidetracked, but there's plenty of healthcare systems where employers provide healthcare and work excellently. Japan, for instance, has an excellent healthcare systems with world leading health results, and is universal, with employers providing for the majority of Japanese citizen's healthcare.
Why is it that the functionally same thing is weighed differently just because the proportions of how that thing is acquired is different?
What do you mean? The index is supposed to be a composite of American's expenditures. Housing is for most people an either-or. Owning a house and renting is very different - you even said how, it's because mortgages tend to be in locked in rates. That's why they're separate categories.
The reason it matters is because when rents as a whole go up by, say, 10%, only ~30% of the American population is affected. So it would not make sense for the housing index to go up by 10%, when that is not the experience of 70% of Americans. Instead, the index goes up by 3%.
Which is why the index is disconnected from reality. Renters are seeing their index going up 10% instead of 3%. And homeowners aren't really getting a good picture of reality going forward. If...
Instead, the index goes up by 3%.
Which is why the index is disconnected from reality. Renters are seeing their index going up 10% instead of 3%. And homeowners aren't really getting a good picture of reality going forward. If rents go up 10%, odds are housing costs will also change by a comparable amount when a given person goes to sell/buy a new home...no? By adjusting their weight so they are roughly equivalent, that 10% change turns into a 6% change...which I'd bet a nickle is much closer to real long-term housing inflation than 3%.
Edit: I realized after the fact you made an arbitrary example percentage. Although FWIW my house has inflated in value approximately 5% annually since I bought it, so my gut math based on your arbitrary percentage isn't actually too far off from reality lol.
It's not disconnected from reality, it's the average of the two disjoint situations. Renters are seeing their rent go up by 10%, but homeowners see their housing costs go up by 0% (or negative, in...
It's not disconnected from reality, it's the average of the two disjoint situations. Renters are seeing their rent go up by 10%, but homeowners see their housing costs go up by 0% (or negative, in real terms). So a 10% increase would be equally disconnected from reality to homeowners. Similarly, the 0% increase is disconnected from renters.
odds are housing costs will also change by a comparable amount when a given person goes to sell/buy a new home...no?
First of all, no, it's not how that works, they're different markets with different dynamics that often move in a pseudo-zero sum way (that is, when rental demand increases, housing demand decreases, so increasing rental prices would be correlative with decreasing real estate prices). Secondly, that's not the point of the CPI. It's not a predictor of the future - in fact, it is the exact opposite, being entirely computed from trailing data.
The real issue is that economic and mathematical literacy in the US is horrible and journalists love nothing more than to write misleading articles and headlines to stoke particular emotions from their readers.
It’s “disconnected from reality” in the sense that any US average is. What other people pay in some other city for some other type of housing is largely irrelevant to your personal situation. I’m...
It’s “disconnected from reality” in the sense that any US average is. What other people pay in some other city for some other type of housing is largely irrelevant to your personal situation.
I’m reminded of the typical mind fallacy where you assume other people think like you do. I guess this would be the “typical prices fallacy” where you assume the prices you see are what everyone else sees.
It’s useful to know that housing costs are going up faster in New York City if you live there, but it wouldn’t tell you the situation for the building you live in.
An average of prices is not an assumption that all prices are the average for each constituent of the averaged population. I don't know of anyone who understands what averages are that equate 'the...
An average of prices is not an assumption that all prices are the average for each constituent of the averaged population. I don't know of anyone who understands what averages are that equate 'the average' with 'the reality of every member of the population'. Seems to me like such conflation is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is meant by average.
Yes, it's clear if you put it that way. But I think a lot of people still make informal assumptions that boil down to their own experience of inflation being a better indicator than official...
Yes, it's clear if you put it that way. But I think a lot of people still make informal assumptions that boil down to their own experience of inflation being a better indicator than official statistics they read about. If the official inflation statistics don't match then they often assume there must be something wrong with them.
It's quite possible that an average is "correct" in some sense but not very useful for understanding your own spending. If you want to track your own spending or the prices that affect you, there...
It's quite possible that an average is "correct" in some sense but not very useful for understanding your own spending. If you want to track your own spending or the prices that affect you, there are better ways.
An example of how it might not be useful is that many people pay lower amounts for housing due to having bought their house a long time ago, or due to rent control, or living with their parents, or some other special deal that's not available to you when you look for a place. Average spending often doesn't match average market price.
Interestingly, the areas tech touches (televisions, software, phones) have experienced deflation. The areas subsidized or regulated by the state (healthcare, education) have experienced real price...
Interestingly, the areas tech touches (televisions, software, phones) have experienced deflation.
Fees paid to co-op and condo boards have soared almost three times faster than the rate of inflation. Ever-tougher rules on inspections, escalating insurance premiums and preparations for a strict new climate law are adding hundreds or even thousands of dollars to monthly bills for residents already paying some of the world’s highest housing costs.
While the charges may be little more than an annoyance to the wealthy owner of a Park Avenue penthouse, they could force New Yorkers of more modest means — from families to seniors on fixed incomes to young first-time buyers — to give up on their hard-won foothold in the city.
…
After years of steep inflation in the US, New Yorkers aren’t alone in paying higher prices for everything from taxes to water, gas and electricity. As routine expenses have surged, so have the fees the city’s condo and co-op boards charge unit owners. Those bills — meant to cover utilities, labor and basic building maintenance — jumped roughly 54% from the first quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of this year, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. Across the economy, US consumer prices were up 19% in the same period.
Piled on top of that are costs for complying with the city’s stricter building standards. Some homeowners and real estate professionals vent that the rules are excessive, and speculate whether special interests that stand to profit might be behind them. Advocates argue the mandates — strengthened after a falling piece of terra cotta struck and killed a pedestrian in 2019 — are needed to keep New Yorkers safe in their homes and on the city’s streets as properties age.
…
In the wake of the pedestrian’s death, the city now bans repairs to damaged terra cotta elements and instead requires that they be fully replaced. The tab could reach $2.5 million as pieces are recast and other repairs are made, pipe scaffolding is rented, the project is insured and a consultant advises on the process, Varsalona said. That would translate to $25,000 on average that each owner in a 100-unit building would have to pay on top of existing maintenance or common charges.
…
Longtime [insurance] carriers are leaving the market, forcing buildings to stitch together multiple policies to get anywhere near the coverage they had just a few years ago. One affordable co-op in the Bronx, for example, is paying 45% more for just 15% of the coverage it had previously.
While natural disasters have sent the industry reeling nationwide, much of the pressure in New York is coming from multimillion-dollar “nuclear verdicts,” payouts of sometimes more than plaintiffs sought in accidents involving construction work.
Insurers are raising prices to make up for their losses, said Sean Kent, senior vice president at FirstService Financial, which works with 600 co-op and condo buildings in the city. Annual premiums at those properties rose as much as 300% this year, though the average increase was about 25%, Kent said.
…
For all but the most energy-efficient buildings, the largest expense on the horizon is Local Law 97. The measure requires properties of at least 25,000 square feet (2,300 square meters) to begin reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by January 2024, though proposed changes could give two more years of leeway to building owners that show a “good faith effort” to comply.
A study commissioned earlier this year by the Real Estate Board of New York estimated that nearly 15% of co-ops would be out of compliance with the emissions limits, facing average annual penalties of about $57,000. Without updates, 72% of co-ops will face similar fines beginning in 2030, when the city’s rules become more stringent.
These costs are exactly why I refuse to invest in a condo or even a co-op. Because you have zero control over costs and if the board says 'you must pay 25,000' in special fees, you dont have a...
These costs are exactly why I refuse to invest in a condo or even a co-op. Because you have zero control over costs and if the board says 'you must pay 25,000' in special fees, you dont have a choice. Its happened many times in the last few years that condos have been found to have substandard builds, particularly roofs, and condo owners buy in without knowing that. Then when the poo hits the fan, they read their condo documents for the first time only to realize that the condo board has not been setting aside an adequate amount of money for repairs to common areas and everyone is getting messed over with a huge bill. There's no way to sell when that bill is going to be shared by the realtor, so its either pay it, or take it off the selling price and lose money. Its illogical to have housing controlled by someone else that can nearly bankrupt you.
If your co-op is set up properly all that information is publicly available and you can see for yourself if the financials are sound. That's just part of the due diligence you're responsible for...
If your co-op is set up properly all that information is publicly available and you can see for yourself if the financials are sound. That's just part of the due diligence you're responsible for when buying in, same as the myriad things you need to consider in a traditional home purchase. An inspection should be done no matter what you're buying and that will turn up issues like a bad roof.
That's how it worked when I bought into mine, at least. I could see from the balance of their replacement fund that it wasn't going to be a problem.
Yeah maybe "public" wasn't the right word, but it's available to prospective members as well so you don't have to buy in before you know what's going on. They provided a financials packet at the...
Yeah maybe "public" wasn't the right word, but it's available to prospective members as well so you don't have to buy in before you know what's going on. They provided a financials packet at the pre-purchase orientation along with all the bylaws and regulations documents.
It's not publicly available but your realtor can request for this. I recommend reading at least three years worth of strata meeting minutes. At least. And ask your real estate lawyer (not realtor)...
It's not publicly available but your realtor can request for this. I recommend reading at least three years worth of strata meeting minutes. At least. And ask your real estate lawyer (not realtor) questions like how much contingency fund is normal, what are some common pitfalls and what they think of this condo.
Me, I would never ever ever buy condos or strata ever again despite having done this ground work.
The idea that housing outpaces inflation is an absurd concept to me.
Housing, food, medical care, transportation and education are about the only 5 things that matter when it comes to inflation. And three of those constantly "outpace inflation" by a very large margin.
Most everything else is shiny baubles of distraction.
Why is it absurd? It’s not strange at all that it’s the case.
For one, inflation is a weighted index composed of multiple categories. If housing costs are driving overall inflation to increase, definitionally the housing costs are higher than inflation as a whole - that is what happens you multiple something by a percentage.
Secondly, “inflation” as Bloomberg is using it is the national average for the US. There is no reason why prices in NYC would exactly equal the national average. In fact, as one of the highest CoL areas in the country, a priori you would expect this to be the case.
That's because you don't spend 100% of your money on that one bill. It's a common misunderstanding of weighted indexes I see all the time. You see that food related inflation was, say, 5% and then you look at the cheese that you're holding in the grocery store that went up 20% and wonder how it could be. Well, do you spend ALL of your food expenditures a month on just cheese? I would hope not. You're biased to notice change, as a human, and when the lettuce cost the same as it always does it goes in one ear and out the other.
The second is yes, you are not representative of the exact weighted average of items the CPI composed. That is basically impossible. Not just location, but precise spending habits determines what your exact mixture would be. To add anecdata, I don't think I've even seen 5% inflation on my expenditures. So there you go, if you have, two sides across the model average.
Third, news articles, like the one we're under, will absolutely hunt for any kind of supposed mismatch possible, because that's what meets the baseline for a headline now. "Inflation at X US city matches US inflation" is a headline only the onion would post.
Because in that example, the bill is just one element of composite spending. Humans are naturally biased towards noticing differences, and that causes everyone's view to be naturally distorted towards change unless you do some careful accounting.
Again, if you are tracking expenses carefully, then it boils down to natural differences between the national average and your expenditure. One is regional - the NYC-NJ Food Away from Home YoY inflation was 6%.
But even then, you probably notice a higher rate of price increase at the restaurants you'd frequent, as a hypothetical manhattan resident. The "average" person represented practically cannot exist - they would consume food at every restaurant in the NYC-NJ area, at levels proportional to their sales. But that is to say, your favorites may be going up higher, but in terms of a regional inflation level, you need to factor in the halal carts, and 2 star google maps review hole in the walls, and McDonalds.
Well, everyone I know has seen below inflation levels of expenditure increase, so in the field of anecdata, the field is even, then.
@douchebag is quite right that's kinda what I was getting at. I found the relevant weight data, and I find it....quite odd.
I have many thoughts but I don't have time to gather them well. Maybe if I find the time later this week I'll take a stab at a tildes-blogpost with an "everyman analysis"
But one thing that immediately jumps out at me is that rent costs have a weight of 10.267 an "owners equivalent rent of primary residence" has a weight of 20.619. Considering those things have roughly equivalent value (to the consumer), having them weighted so drastically different definitely throws some red flags...especially since I would expect the rent to shift far more dramatically YoY than "owners equivalent rent".
The cost of a cable subscription is weighed higher than my health insurance. And I spend more than 6x the amount of money on my health insurance.
Why? In the US, 68% of households own the home they live in. That seems about right for the weight, then (should be a roughly 2/3rds to 1/3rd ratio).
Remember that the majority of Americans are either 1) get insurance from their employer or 2) are covered by medicare. If you are self employed, and pay for your own insurance, then yes, absolutely your expenditures vary more on the price of insurance, as it should, because you are not like the average american.
My last year's health care expenditure was $0: my health insurance is fully paid for by work, and every visit to a doctor was fully covered with no copay. So I paid infinitely more for streaming services than I did for healthcare. For me, this is drastically overrepresenting the care of healthcare.
We're both Americans, and we both count as one point in the 330 million population average.
Just because your employer provides the insurance doesn't mean you're not paying for it. It's just that they've removed that money from your pay and added it to a different bucket. Employers have no business providing healthcare for their employees anyway (though yes this is a major tangent). The only difference between you and me (other than that your plan is nicer than mine) is that I see the true cost of the expense.... $675 from me, + $1,800 from employer.
The more important question is: Why is it that the functionally same thing is weighed differently just because the proportions of how that thing is acquired is different? It'd be like having separate categories for "Apples purchased with cash" and "Apples purchased with credit card".
The only "advantage" that I see is that the owner rent will rise much slower because rent goes up every year while owner rent only goes up when the owner moves or refinances.
Sure, but you can't gather data on how much the employer didn't pay you. It'll show up in the statistics for annual income, then.
I don't want to get too sidetracked, but there's plenty of healthcare systems where employers provide healthcare and work excellently. Japan, for instance, has an excellent healthcare systems with world leading health results, and is universal, with employers providing for the majority of Japanese citizen's healthcare.
What do you mean? The index is supposed to be a composite of American's expenditures. Housing is for most people an either-or. Owning a house and renting is very different - you even said how, it's because mortgages tend to be in locked in rates. That's why they're separate categories.
The reason it matters is because when rents as a whole go up by, say, 10%, only ~30% of the American population is affected. So it would not make sense for the housing index to go up by 10%, when that is not the experience of 70% of Americans. Instead, the index goes up by 3%.
Which is why the index is disconnected from reality. Renters are seeing their index going up 10% instead of 3%. And homeowners aren't really getting a good picture of reality going forward. If rents go up 10%, odds are housing costs will also change by a comparable amount when a given person goes to sell/buy a new home...no? By adjusting their weight so they are roughly equivalent, that 10% change turns into a 6% change...which I'd bet a nickle is much closer to real long-term housing inflation than 3%.
Edit: I realized after the fact you made an arbitrary example percentage. Although FWIW my house has inflated in value approximately 5% annually since I bought it, so my gut math based on your arbitrary percentage isn't actually too far off from reality lol.
It's not disconnected from reality, it's the average of the two disjoint situations. Renters are seeing their rent go up by 10%, but homeowners see their housing costs go up by 0% (or negative, in real terms). So a 10% increase would be equally disconnected from reality to homeowners. Similarly, the 0% increase is disconnected from renters.
First of all, no, it's not how that works, they're different markets with different dynamics that often move in a pseudo-zero sum way (that is, when rental demand increases, housing demand decreases, so increasing rental prices would be correlative with decreasing real estate prices). Secondly, that's not the point of the CPI. It's not a predictor of the future - in fact, it is the exact opposite, being entirely computed from trailing data.
The real issue is that economic and mathematical literacy in the US is horrible and journalists love nothing more than to write misleading articles and headlines to stoke particular emotions from their readers.
It’s “disconnected from reality” in the sense that any US average is. What other people pay in some other city for some other type of housing is largely irrelevant to your personal situation.
I’m reminded of the typical mind fallacy where you assume other people think like you do. I guess this would be the “typical prices fallacy” where you assume the prices you see are what everyone else sees.
It’s useful to know that housing costs are going up faster in New York City if you live there, but it wouldn’t tell you the situation for the building you live in.
An average of prices is not an assumption that all prices are the average for each constituent of the averaged population. I don't know of anyone who understands what averages are that equate 'the average' with 'the reality of every member of the population'. Seems to me like such conflation is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is meant by average.
Yes, it's clear if you put it that way. But I think a lot of people still make informal assumptions that boil down to their own experience of inflation being a better indicator than official statistics they read about. If the official inflation statistics don't match then they often assume there must be something wrong with them.
It's quite possible that an average is "correct" in some sense but not very useful for understanding your own spending. If you want to track your own spending or the prices that affect you, there are better ways.
An example of how it might not be useful is that many people pay lower amounts for housing due to having bought their house a long time ago, or due to rent control, or living with their parents, or some other special deal that's not available to you when you look for a place. Average spending often doesn't match average market price.
Interestingly, the areas tech touches (televisions, software, phones) have experienced deflation.
The areas subsidized or regulated by the state (healthcare, education) have experienced real price increases:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-consumer-goods-services-united-states
From the article:
…
…
…
…
These costs are exactly why I refuse to invest in a condo or even a co-op. Because you have zero control over costs and if the board says 'you must pay 25,000' in special fees, you dont have a choice. Its happened many times in the last few years that condos have been found to have substandard builds, particularly roofs, and condo owners buy in without knowing that. Then when the poo hits the fan, they read their condo documents for the first time only to realize that the condo board has not been setting aside an adequate amount of money for repairs to common areas and everyone is getting messed over with a huge bill. There's no way to sell when that bill is going to be shared by the realtor, so its either pay it, or take it off the selling price and lose money. Its illogical to have housing controlled by someone else that can nearly bankrupt you.
If your co-op is set up properly all that information is publicly available and you can see for yourself if the financials are sound. That's just part of the due diligence you're responsible for when buying in, same as the myriad things you need to consider in a traditional home purchase. An inspection should be done no matter what you're buying and that will turn up issues like a bad roof.
That's how it worked when I bought into mine, at least. I could see from the balance of their replacement fund that it wasn't going to be a problem.
Interesting. By “publicly available” do you mean it’s online? How would I look this up for a particular co-op building?
I would imagine that this wouldn't be available to the public, but to all members of the coop.
Yeah maybe "public" wasn't the right word, but it's available to prospective members as well so you don't have to buy in before you know what's going on. They provided a financials packet at the pre-purchase orientation along with all the bylaws and regulations documents.
It's not publicly available but your realtor can request for this. I recommend reading at least three years worth of strata meeting minutes. At least. And ask your real estate lawyer (not realtor) questions like how much contingency fund is normal, what are some common pitfalls and what they think of this condo.
Me, I would never ever ever buy condos or strata ever again despite having done this ground work.