Buying
Buying a condo in San Diego
What the association package tells you, why low dues can be the expensive option, the balcony inspection every California condo now owes, and the loan and rental rules that catch buyers out.
What should I know before buying a condo in San Diego?
Buying a condo in San Diego means buying a share of an association as well as a unit, so the association's finances matter as much as the condition of the home itself. Dues, reserve funding, any pending special assessment, the rental rules and whether the project is approved for the loan being used all sit outside the four walls and all affect the purchase.
California gives a buyer the right to review the association's documents, and the package is where the real information is: the budget, the reserve study, the minutes for the past year, the governing documents and any litigation disclosure. Minutes are the most under-read and most revealing of these — a board discussing a roof or a plumbing repipe for three meetings running is telling you about an assessment before it is formally proposed.
Read them inside the contingency period rather than after it. Once contingencies are removed the information is still arriving but the exit is gone, and the seventeen-day default is shorter than an HOA's document-delivery timeline sometimes turns out to be.
What do HOA dues cover, and what is a special assessment?
HOA dues on a San Diego condo typically fund the building's insurance, exterior and common-area maintenance, shared utilities like water and trash, management, and contributions to reserves for future major repairs. A special assessment is what an association charges owners on top of dues when those reserves are not sufficient for the work required.
Low dues are not automatically good news, which is the opposite of what most buyers assume. Dues held artificially low starve the reserves, and underfunded reserves are how special assessments happen — so a building with comfortable dues and a well-funded reserve study is often the cheaper purchase over five years than one with the lowest monthly figure on the listing.
Read the reserve study for the percentage funded and for which components are near the end of their useful life. Roof, elevators, plumbing and decks are the four that produce the large assessments. Rising insurance costs are also pushing dues up across California, which is a live pressure rather than a historical one.
What is the SB 326 balcony inspection and why does it matter to a buyer?
SB 326 requires every California condominium association, San Diego included, to have its exterior elevated elements — balconies, decks, stairs and elevated walkways — inspected by a licensed structural or civil engineer. The first inspection was due by 1 January 2025 and they repeat every nine years.
The law followed the 2015 Berkeley balcony collapse, and it matters to a buyer for a financial reason rather than a structural one: the inspection frequently finds work, the work is expensive, and if reserves do not cover it the cost reaches owners as a special assessment. Buying into a building that has just been told it needs balcony repairs means buying a share of that bill.
So ask two questions of any San Diego condo with balconies or elevated walkways: has the SB 326 inspection been completed, and what did it find. An association that has not done one is exposed to daily penalties and to a negligence finding if someone is later hurt, which is its own reason to look closely. Both answers should be in the documents; if they are not, ask in writing.
Can I use a VA or FHA loan to buy a condo in San Diego?
A VA or FHA loan can buy a San Diego condo only if the project itself is approved, not merely the borrower. Both agencies maintain lists of approved condominium projects, and a unit in an unapproved building cannot be financed that way regardless of how strong the buyer is.
That catches military buyers here more than anywhere, because San Diego has one of the largest concentrations of VA-eligible buyers in the country and plenty of attractive buildings are not on the list. Approval is a project-level process an association has to pursue, and a seller cannot make it happen inside a normal escrow.
Check approval status before writing, not after. It is published by each agency and a lender can confirm it in minutes, which is a great deal cheaper than discovering it three weeks into escrow. FHA does allow single-unit approval in some unapproved projects, so an early conversation with the lender is worth having rather than assuming either way.
Can I rent out a condo I buy in San Diego?
Renting out a San Diego condo is governed by two separate rulebooks that both have to permit it: the association's own governing documents, which commonly cap the proportion of units that may be rented or impose a minimum lease term, and the City's short-term rental licensing regime.
Rental caps are the one buyers miss. A building at its cap will not let a new owner rent at all until a slot frees, and the cap exists partly because lenders scrutinise owner-occupancy ratios — a building that tips too far toward renters can become harder to finance for everyone in it, which affects resale as well as income.
Short-term letting is a separate question again, and in the City of San Diego it requires a license under a capped tiered system rather than merely an absence of HOA objection. The license rules, the tiers and what the caps actually mean are set out in the short-term rental ordinance. Confirm both rulebooks before buying on the assumption of rental income.
Have the documents read before you commit
Send the building and we will go through the association package with you — reserve funding, the minutes, any assessment in the pipeline, the rental position and whether the project is approved for the loan you are using. It is a short conversation that regularly changes a decision.
Last updated 2026-09-11