The Royal Run 2023 HOA Dues amount per home is $659. To help understand why we are at this number and to understand how the money is being used, please refer to the information below.
First, here is a breakdown showing how many dollars of that amount are being allocated to each major section of the budget:
The $ amounts in the chart above may be hard to read if you are on a device that you cannot zoom – here they are in list form:
$190.75 – Reserve contribution
$171.05 – Landscaping
$73.87 – Pool
$68.33 – Administration
$65.93 – General maintenance (clubhouse, common area/sports courts and other amenities)
$33.47 – Ponds
$31.20 – Utilities
$20.28 – Insurance
$6.08 – Taxes/Miscellaneous
Here is the same information broken out by percentages:
The Reserve Contribution is an important concept to understand (especially with it being the largest category of the operating budget) – this is NOT money that is being held as a ‘rainy day fund’, but instead is actually being put aside intentionally each year according to a defined schedule (which was calculated in a professionally prepared external ‘reserve study’). This amount of money going into reserves builds up in multiple RR asset categories over the time period it is being held, until that particular major asset or amenity comes due for repair or replacement according to the schedule. Example: the walking paths are coming due to be repaved, and because the expense to repave would be more than half of the annual operating budget, they will be financed by the money that has been put aside every year in the reserves.
The dues increased from 2022 to 2023 by $31 or right around 5%. The RR Board of Directors reviews every year whether or not HOA dues need to be raised – it is NOT an automatic increase. The maximum amount that dues may be raised by the Board is 5%. The recent years (2017 through 2023) have all had increases close to that 5% raise – we would like to share with the community the specific things that have been driving those increases. Here is a chart that compares the 2017 budget against the 2023 budget (or basically, a look of what has changed in 6 years):
As you can see, there are 4 major areas that have driven a large portion of the increase. All 4 of these areas also have been influenced by two separate concepts within each; 1) the focus of the RR Board on improving each of these areas because of the predominance of complaints residing in each and 2) the rise of labor/material costs from the vendors servicing those areas.
For the first concept – in 2017/2018, for any who lived in the neighborhood then – we had ponds full of algae, common area grass that was not regularly being cut or was missed consistently, and a dissatisfactory pool experience for many homeowners. The Board pursued vendors and solutions for each that would address those concerns, obviously with some new cost coming then for each. Unfortunately for the second concept – the recent economic situation has impacted the labor and materials in each of those same areas as well, providing even greater rising costs in the last year or two. Our pool contract just from 2021 to 2022 jumped around $5k. From 2022 to 2023, it was another $10k (chemicals and labor being primary drivers) The landscape contract was around $82k in 2017, to $95k in 2020, to now $111k in 2023. Keeping up with these rising costs has necessitated the dues being increased alongside them at the 5% amount that they have been.
At the same time – we’ve had some victories; notice that the utilities for 2023 are now actually less than they were in 2017, owing to the LED replacement project that was undertaken for all of our streetlights. Administrative costs have been held to a much slower increase by comparison to other categories by reducing services and unnecessary features where possible.
The Board also generally strives to provide a comparison chart each year of the dues of Royal Run compared to other nearby neighborhoods/HOAs and their dues. The way that these dues are obtained generally is by looking at the MLS listings of homes for sale and the disclosures – unfortunately in the last 2 years this information has been much harder to come by. As such – the 2021 chart is going to be presented below (it has RR’s 2021’s number of $598, as well as the numbers of the other communities from 2020/2021). While not guaranteed obviously, it is reasonable to assume that the rising service costs have likely affected the other communities in a similar manner to RR and so the chart is likely still accurate in terms of top to bottom positioning, with other communities likely to have increased their dues as well.
2021 Dues of Surrounding Communities
The Board likes to share this chart to help put the dues being paid into better perspective with the nearby neighborhoods and what amenities are actually being covered by those dues. Colony Woods as an example has extremely low dues, but does not have hardly any common area (compared against RR’s nearly 80 acres of common area that must be cared for). There are also neighborhoods nearby that have less amenities than RR, but also have higher dues. Again – this chart is not going to be perfect but is meant to mainly serve as a reference point of what value is coming from the money being spent in HOA dues in our community.