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I had an interesting discussion with a friend who's buying a flat right now. He opened for me a completely new perspective - the lifecycle of big apartment buildings. The place where we live got its first high rise in late 1950s. About half of the people are living in apartment buildings built since then, and we never ever had that kind of construction object reach end of life. Important detail is that huge percentage of Croats live in their own mortgage, renting is not popular here and people aren't mobile in that context.

So - my own example - building is built in 1968. It will reach EOL, by all standards, in my lifetime. I own a flat. All of us together that own these flats inside, own the building. There's a system how that's managed but it isn't important, the building is collectively owned by private persons, and what the hell will happen when some government agency comes in a few decades and says that building is not safe any more?

The flat where my folks live is in a building that probably has a Nimitz-class displacement. List prices wise, to buy each and every flat in the building and become a sole owner, you'd need 40 to 50 million euros. All that "value", potential money that they can have tommorow if they sell today, would be lost for owners if they, or better we including myself don't work the issue while there's still time. Country isn't going to help, it's not that kind of country.

I resort to Maidenfans in giving me relevant information about preempting the problems of the far future.
 
Interesting question. Buildings, unlike cars, are supposed to last - but they are also required to be maintained for big money every now and then. The market value of an apartment will decrease as it gets older, but increase when it is refurbished/upgraded. But when most people own the place where they live, it is also an investment, and then you get the potential for a situation where, in an old building, everyone will want to sell and get out before the value crashes.

And what if you buy an apartment, you upgrade and make sure the value of that apartment keeps up with the market - only to find that the majority of apartments in your block have been neglected to such an extent that their values drop, or worse even - that other apartments and the building in general is in a really bad shape while your place is top shape? You might end up having an expensive apartment becoming worthless.
 
Yup Wingman, that's the bottom of it - I cannot do anything without consensus of other co-owners. There's also a management system problem, one co-owner council is one building entrance. The entrance is the house number and that's the house basically, so you can see these long buildings here with a new paint applied to only a fragment in the middle, like a vertical strip - because that "house" paid for repaint. In another "house", eg. the next entrance might installed a new elevator instead. And so on.

The councils do cooperate to put a new isolation on the roofs for instance, and now in recent time when those EU green energy efficiency certificates got implemented, a lot of them made maintenance on the facades. However none of this is related to lifetime of concrete structural elements such as load bearing walls.
 
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