My partner and I are planning to put our home on the market this year and we’re quite keen to downsize and buy an apartment in the city. We’ve got friends living in apartments and they rave about it. They’ve sold us on the idea of being able to walk everywhere and being liberated from spending our weekends on house and garden maintenance. However, we’ve also heard horror stories about apartment owners having to spend huge sums on earthquake strengthening or fixing leaky building issues. We definitely don’t want to sign up for that kind of hassle and my partner reckons we’d be better off staying in our old wooden house in the ‘burbs. I don’t want to give up the dream, but how do we tell if an apartment is a good buy?

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