In the housing meltdown, even outside the usual housing bust hotspots, some condominium owners are faring even worse than owners of single-family homes.
In some gentrifying neighborhoods of Boston, for instance, where condo conversions of the city’s storied triple-decker row houses were rampant in the last decade, many owners now find they can’t sell their units, partly because of tougher lending requirements by government-sponsored mortgage backers including the Federal Housing Administration, some real-estate experts say.
The new rules, enacted recently to help forestall rising foreclosures, mean many condo projects no longer qualify for financing by some GSE-backed mortgages because they require more information about the financial soundness of the entire condo project than in the past.