– I want top floor
I hear it quite often. We live on the 10th floor of a 17-story oceanfront condominium. Gorgeous view of the ocean to the east and the Halifax River to the west. We have it all.
Newcomers usually want the top floor. Many people believe that the higher you are, the better the view.
But view is not the only thing to think of when you are choosing a condo in Daytona Beach area. There are other important considerations.
Example:
There is a project in our condo – refurbishing the elevators. This is a big job, and takes a long of time. We have been with one working elevator for several months now.
Elevators are designed so that they communicate with each other, and this communication is now severed. So, while it was very rare occasion before, now we time from time have the elevator stop working.
Management calls the elevator company, and they send the technician to fix it. The company is in Orlando, and the technician takes minimum an hour to come.
Last Saturday the elevator was not working. I called the emergency, they noted it, however, we did not want to sit and wait for the technician. So we walked up the stairs to our 10th floor. It was not fun. I had to stop 3 times. What if I lived on the 17 floor. Or on 21 floor in Oceans Eight, or on 27th floor of Peck Plaza?
We have a lot of older people. Majority of people in our building are older than me. Imagine someone having a heart attack on Saturday or Sunday, when the manager is not there? EMT would be within 2 minutes, and then what?
In our building you can’t get from the lobby to the stairs. You have to go outside and from there open the door to stairs. And to get to the stairs you need a hard key, which EMT do not have. They need someone to let them in to the stairs.
So, a spouse attending to a patient has to run down 17 floors to open the door to the stairs? And even if someone does, how much time would it take 2 guys with a stretcher to get to the 17th floor so that they can give nitro to a patient? And then how much time would it take them to get the patient down the stairs?
Even if we do not take something as dangerous and dramatic as heart attack, there are simpler things in life that may become difficult. What if you have dogs, and they need to go out?
Or if there is fire, and in this case the elevators would be shut down? What if the hurricane causes loss of power (happened before), and nothing works and you are on a top floor?
When this happens, wouldn’t you be upset that your agent never mentioned these things, never warned you? But when you were hiring the agent, did you ask the agent whether s/he lived in a condo? If not, how do they know?
Choose the agent wisely…
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Jon Zolsky is a Daytona condo broker with Daytona Condo Realty
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