Hi Everyone,

I am hoping there are some current residents of Brooks Tower on here who can help me understand the pros and cons of Brooks Tower. I love the location but the HOA fees seem very high, even compared to other downtown highrises.

Can anyone who lives there now help me understand the best and worst things about living at Brooks?

Thank you,

Your Potential New Neighbor!

Comments …

May 10, 2007     Guest

I’ve got some ideas on this one..

Pros:
* Location, Location, Location – You can’t beat the location of Brooks. Not only is living Downtown the best, but the central location of BT makes this one of the best locations within downtown. Its convenient to upper downtown for the Pavillions: movies, bowling, and shopping; but its also a quick jaunt to Coors Field, Pepsi Center, Elitch Gardens, and LoDo. Not to mention the performing arts center just 1 block away. If you find a location in LoDo or in Upper Downtown, you would start to distance yourself from half of what downtown has to offer. Not so with Brooks.

Cons:
* Parking – Parking needs at Brooks were severely underestimated when this tower was built 40 years ago. There are approximately 250 parking spaces and 535 condos. It doesn’t take an economics degree to know that this will lead to parking being unavailable at any price and/or very expensive parking. All of the parking is deeded separate from the units, but most if not all are owned by condo owners. When you can find a parking spot to rent, expect to pay $200-$250 per month.
* Financial and Operations Management – The Brooks Tower Homeowners Association manages the finances poorly, evidenced by the highest HOA fees (even among downtown condo buildings) and inappropriate renovation funding out of homeowners pockets. The building management is good to mediocre, depending on the topic/issue. An example of mediocrity is the 5 months that have passed since the lack of recycling in the tower was brought up as an issue and still no solution. There is surely some work that has to be done to find a solution, but five months seems excessive and we’re still not there yet. At the same time, the building management will often go out of their way to help if you have a problem or issue.

Hope that helps!

Jun 16, 2007     Cindy Smith

I bought my condo in Brooks Tower over 2 years ago. I found that the homeowner’s fees were less than any other place we looked at. Remember, the homeowners fees include cable with several movie stations, the health club and swimming pool, the game room and 24 hour desk help. Also, we get a key to 7-11 so don’t have to go outside at night. We think Brooks Tower is the best downtown living available and especially for the price. The Four Seasons will be sellilng 1 bedroom units beginning at $800,000 and won’t even quote the homeowners fee yet!!!!

Sep 16, 2007     Bryan

Hi Cindy,

I’m very curious about which other buildings you looked at where you found higher HOA fees. My HOA fees on a 2 bedrooms with 1 parking space are $0.44 per square foot per month (except this year while they are $0.62, thanks to the the elevator repair assessment) and the only place I have found that are similar or higher is the Beauvallon on Lincoln.

According to the sales team at Glass House in Riverfront Park, their HOA fees for a unit with one parking space are around $0.32 per square foot and I am not sure of the figure but I’ve heard that fees at the Barclay (16th and Larimer) are lower than Brooks.

I really don’t think the Four Seasons is an appropriate comparison as that building (if it is ever actually built) will be a 5-star luxury building with full hotel services available.

Anyway, would be great to have some information posted here about what various building’s HOA fees are. I find that $ per square foot is the only way to really compare the fees in an apples to apples manner and we have to note whether parking is included in the figures.

You mentioned the 24 hours front desk as a nice benefit for our HOA fees, but at the same time, I think having two 24-hour staff members at Brooks (the Front Desk and the Parking Attendant) is silly. If it were my decision, the Parking Garage entrance would be better lit, a video monitor/2-way speaker would be installed to connect the parking entrance with the front desk, and the front desk would have control of the parking gates.

We could eliminate a relatively significant piece of our largest budget expense category (Labor) and have better control of the parking garage (who hasn’t sat behind someone blocking the entrance to the parking garage because the parking attendant is walking around the parking garage). The one roadblock to this idea might be considered to be Guest Parking, but this could be worked around. If our cameras on the parking garage entrance showed the license plate number clearly, the front desk attendant could accomplish the same tasks that the parking attendant does when a visitor parks at Brooks and the visitor would be told they must go to the front desk to pay for their parking before leaving (and the front desk attendant would verify payment when they let the visitor out of the garage).

I have always had these feelings about two 24-hour staff members being fiscally wasteful, but my feelings are compounded by a negative experience with theft in the parking garage. My parking space is 50 yards from the front desk attendant who we pay to be there 24 hours per day and in 2004, the bike I had locked on the bike rack in my parking space (which is bolted to the wall) was stolen. I was told by staff that the cameras did not capture anything to help investigate the case (which is amazing considering how many cameras we have in the parking garage). I was told that my bike, and others, were probably loaded into an SUV that was in the garage and driven out; and that it was an inside job. So it is particularly frustrating to incur an unnecessary HOA expense (in my opinion) and not even get any additional security from the expense.

Finally, last year, I heard through the rumor mill that the bike thefts were an inside job – that it was actually a staff member who stole them! The HOA never gave me this update, which makes sense if you think about the fact that they would be liable for the theft if it were a staff member. However, to not provide this information to me and the others who had their bikes stolen is extremely unethical in my opinion, if this unconfirmed rumor is indeed true.

Anyway, the bike theft story is indicative of a larger problem with our HOA, but again the point I really want to make here is that we could use technology to make a relatively significant reduction in our Labor expense. I wouldn’t be surprised if we could offset the expense of installing the necessary technology in year one with the labor expense savings, but we would have to sit down with some estimates and a labor expense breakout to really see what the payback period would be.

If anyone else has information to share about comparison HOA fees from other Denver condos, please do share them!

Sep 11, 2008     Matt

Brooks Tower is fantastic, it was one of the best places I lived in Denver.

Oct 14, 2008     Tim

The issues with owning at Brooks Tower aside, I miss living there. It is a great location and Downtown Denver is a very fun place to live

Nov 14, 2008     Brooks Homeowner

I agree with the statements that the HOA fees are out of control and now we are facing a 7% increase. My question to the poor management is why are these fees so high in the first place? I’ve heard a rumor that we are paying the cleaning service 25K a month and brooks gives them the cleaning supplies seperately on top of that. Something doesn’t compute on this when you are paying minimum wage to a handful of employees and have virtually no overhead. Who is pocketing all of this money? When was the last time we did some price comparisons and shopped around for this service?

Also, I’ve heard rumors that the handful of people on the management team is seriously overpaid and these same folks have political ties to residents that own multiple properties who control a lot of the Board’s decisions. These same owners are given the white gloved treatment and are catered to by the management while the rest of the owners are brushed aside.

Owners need an opportunity to truly audit the building’s expenses but realistically due to the personal interests they will be buried and never come to light.

Ultimately, the building needs to outsource its HOA and management to a 3rd party agency that does not have personal and political interests involved to control the escalating costs and actually get the work done the building truly requires. This way we are not spending 4 months repainting the same damned wall in the lobby over and over again. Yes, the lobby and other amenities are in serious need of updating especially for the property to be competitive but why the hell does it take so long to get this done?!

3rd party agency has my vote. No political interests, better at managing our money at will actually get the work done.

Dec 3, 2008     Guest

Did the 7% HOA Dues increase pass?

Dec 8, 2008     Brooks Homeowner

Unfortunately the increase did pass. There only needs to be 20% vote for this to happen. Essentially the only way to prevent something like this is for there to be a huge outcry which from my knowledge has only happened once in the last several years.

Dec 10, 2008     Guest

ha .. The Brooks Tower HOA never met a dollar they didn’t love to spend. Its funny to me that over the last seven years I’ve never heard anything about a cost-cutting/cost take-out initiative. It seems like the HOA Board thinks there’s only one way to address negative net income – increase the revenue (i.e., raise homeowner dues).

There must be a lot of owners at Brooks with money to burn. All of these increases with no attention to cost efficiencies or cost take-out would cause outrage with the average person on a budget. Its obvious that the Brooks Tower owners are not the average middle-class, they must be mostly upper-class.

Dec 11, 2008     Brooks Homeowner

There has been a lot of recent inquiries about the expenses in the building but the HOA doesn’t seem to want to put in the effort to cut costs and the residents are starved of information so we are unable to analyze where all the money is being spent. To my knowledge services are rarely ever bid out for the best contact. There are a lot of frustrated residents but unfortunately there is a monopoly on the vote due to a handful of property owners who own a large majority of the units and some of these individuals are on the HOA board who control the decisions for everyone else, the average middle-class person who is budget conscious.

Jun 11, 2009     guest

Why not take control of your management? In our neighborhood of 75 homes, our elected officers decided to fire the management company and do it themselves. It was enlightening to see where all the money was being funneled.

Jun 11, 2009     J

Regarding the previous comment, unfortunately- Brooks is a little bit different. In your neighborhood of 75 homes, there probably weren’t many, if any, owners who owned multiple homes so you probably all had an equal vote. At Brooks Tower, there is a vote % for each unit owned like any HOA, but there are a handful of individuals or organizations who own a high percentage of units and have a disproportional vote.

These few are the ones running the building and making all of the decisions and it would take agreement of virtually all other owners to vote them out. I agree that the majority of owners need to something to take control of the building back though.

Aug 13, 2009     Brooks owner

I am so pleased to read that other people are concerned with the rising costs, lack of accountability, wasteful spending, questionable interests of management. What I have opted to do is attend all committee meetings to learn more about their responsibilities, ask questions and comment on concerns. We cannot keep complaining if we are unwilling to participate in solving the problem. Attend meetings and have your voice heard. Then maybe we can all get together and really have something accomplished!

Nov 30, 2009     JT

The reason the HOA fees are high is it includes heat and cable TV your only other expense is Electric and Telephone