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Innovative Development Opportunities Abound In Philadelphia Commercial Land Condominiums

By Kevin M. Levy and Krystal R. Bordoni-Cowley
February 01, 2024

Condominium development has been around since the 1960s and has ramped up in recent years. Within larger parcels where multiple structures or different uses are planned, developers in the greater Philadelphia area are increasingly turning toward a newer form of joint ownership of property to develop large projects: the horizontal, or land, condominium. While the appetite for building new vertical residential condominium buildings in Philadelphia has slowed since the onset of the pandemic, many commercial developers are now considering early on whether applying a land condominium regime makes sense for integrated development projects.

The basic condominium concept is that a person or a company owns their individual unit within the condominium, and together with their fee ownership of their individual unit, the owner has a proportionate undivided interest in the entirety of the common elements of the condominium. Collectively, all of the owners in the condominium own 100% of the common elements of the condominium. Think, for example, of a vertical residential condominium tower: a person owns their own unit within the building, and all of the owners together own the common parts of the building such as hallways, the elevator bays, and the reception areas on the ground floor. Instead of paying rent to a landlord, the owner of the unit pays their own mortgage and pays condominium fees to a unit owners association established for the maintenance of the common elements of the building.

Land condominiums work similarly to their vertical and residential condominium counterparts. However, instead of spreading the condominium up into the air with units stacked atop one another (as is typical of vertical condominiums), the land condominium tends to spread horizontally with units standing apart from each other. To the average onlooker, a land condominium may appear similar to an office park or a shopping center with various owners.

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