A condo buyer and a house buyer walk into your website on the same afternoon. She wants to know what the $480 monthly fee covers and whether the building has saved enough for the roof. He wants to know how old the actual roof is. One page called "Buying a Home" sends both of them away.
The two buyers are researching different risks
The overlap between these two searches is smaller than most agents assume. Both people need financing and both will make an offer, which is the part every generic buyer page covers. Everything that decides whether they are comfortable is different.
A condo buyer is buying a share of a building run by a group of owners. Her risk is collective: a decision made by people she has never met can cost her $18,000 next year. Her research is about the health of that group and the money it has set aside.
A house buyer owns everything, which means every future cost is his alone. His risk is physical: the age of the roof, the state of the foundation, what the electrical panel can handle. His research is about the condition of objects.
Neither of them cares much about the other's questions. A page that tries to serve both spends half its length on material each reader skips.
The condo questions almost nobody answers properly
Start with the monthly fee, because it is the first number a condo buyer sees and the one they least understand. A fee of $480 tells them nothing until they know what it buys. In many buildings it covers building insurance, water, landscaping, management, and contributions to a savings fund for major repairs. In others it covers heat and hot water too, which makes a higher fee cheaper in practice. Write what a fee typically includes in your market and what it usually excludes.
Then the savings fund, which has two names depending on where you work. In British Columbia it is the contingency reserve fund and the report that plans it is the depreciation report. In most of the United States it is the reserve fund and the report is the reserve study. Both do the same job: estimate what the shared parts of the building will cost to repair over the next few decades, and compare that to what the owners have saved.
This is the single most useful thing you can explain to a condo buyer, because it is the number that predicts their surprise costs. In British Columbia the rules changed on July 1, 2024. Strata corporations with five or more lots must now obtain a depreciation report on a five-year cycle, and the option to vote it away each year was removed entirely, according to the provincial government's published requirements. Buildings without a recent report have until July 1, 2026 in Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, and the Capital Regional District, and until July 1, 2027 elsewhere in the province. If you sell condos in BC, that deadline is a content opportunity with a date attached.
Next, special assessments. A special assessment is a one-time charge the owners approve when a repair costs more than the savings on hand. Buyers have heard the phrase and fear it without understanding when it happens. Explain the link: weak savings plus an aging building equals higher odds. That is a mechanism they can evaluate for themselves.
Then the rules. Pets and rentals are the two that break deals after an offer is accepted. Rules vary by building and are overridden by local law in some places, so state what governs it where you work and always send the buyer to the actual bylaws for the specific unit.
Finally, the management company, which confuses almost every first-time condo buyer. It is a business hired by the owners to run daily operations: collecting fees, arranging repairs, keeping records. The owners' council or board makes the decisions. Knowing who does what tells a buyer whose minutes to read.
The house questions that matter
House buyers want the age and condition of expensive things, in a form they can price.
The roof is first because it is the largest single number. Say what materials are common in your area, roughly how long each lasts in your climate, and what a replacement costs locally. An asphalt roof in a wet coastal market behaves differently from one in a dry inland market, and a buyer who knows that can read a listing better.
Heating and cooling next. The age of a furnace, boiler, or heat pump, and whether the fuel type is common in your area, changes both the monthly cost and the upgrade path. Water heaters are cheaper and fail more often.
Then the parts that make lenders and insurers nervous: the electrical panel, the plumbing material, and the foundation. Buyers do not need you to be an inspector. They need to know which report findings usually mean a negotiation and which usually mean walking away.
Last, the land. Lot dimensions, what the local rules allow to be built, and whether a secondary suite or a laneway house is possible. In many markets this is the difference between a house that carries itself and one that does not, and it is the question buyers most often ask an agent instead of a search engine.
Why one generic page loses both audiences
A combined buyer page has a length problem. To cover condos and houses honestly, it needs to run long, and long generic pages get skimmed. So the writer keeps it short by staying shallow, and shallow means every sentence is something the reader already knew.
There is a searching problem too. Somebody typing a question about what a depreciation report says is not typing the words "buying a home". They are typing a specific worry. A page whose heading matches that worry has a chance. A page called "Buyer Resources" does not.
And there is a trust problem, which is the expensive one. NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found 88 percent of buyers bought through an agent, so the question is never whether they will use one. The question is which one they call. A page that names the exact thing keeping them awake is the strongest argument you have that you know your market. Our post on what buyers check on agent websites covers the rest of that first visit.
How this maps to pages and searches
Make a condo page and a house page. Give each one a title that uses the words your local buyers use.
Under the condo page, the questions that earn their own section are: what the monthly fee covers, what the depreciation report or reserve study tells you, how special assessments happen, the rules on pets and rentals, and what the management company does. Each of those is a real search.
Under the house page: the age of major systems, what a roof costs to replace in your area, common report findings and what they mean, and what the lot allows.
If one of those sections grows past four or five paragraphs, it has earned its own page. A page titled with the plain question, answering it in the first two sentences, is the shape that gets found and quoted.
Link the two pages to each other. A buyer comparing a townhouse against a small detached house is doing exactly that comparison, and giving them both sides keeps them on your site instead of back in the search results.
The AI search angle
When someone asks an assistant what a special assessment is, the assistant answers from general knowledge. When they ask what a strata fee typically covers in a specific city, or whether a building in a specific market needs a depreciation report by a specific date, the assistant needs a source.
Google's documentation on its AI features is direct about what that takes. "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features," and there is "no special schema.org structured data that you need to add," according to Google Search Central. What it asks for is content that can be crawled, kept in text rather than images, and indexed normally.
That favours the split structure for a plain reason. A page that answers one question directly is quotable. A page that mentions twelve topics in passing gives an assistant nothing it can lift as an answer.
Local specifics are where an agent wins here. General definitions already sit inside the model. What a fee covers in your buildings, what your local rules require, and what the last two years of assessments in your market looked like are facts only a local source has.
Writing it without pretending to be an inspector
Two habits keep this content honest and useful.
Say what you know from doing the work, and mark the rest as something to verify. "In the buildings I sell in this area, fees usually include water and building insurance. Check the specific building's financial statements, because there are exceptions" is more useful than a confident rule that turns out wrong.
Give a number only when you have a source. If you have not looked up the local cost of a roof replacement this year, say the range you have seen in recent transactions and say that is what it is. A buyer who catches one invented figure stops trusting the whole page.
Then add the part a search result cannot do. You can pull the documents for a specific building, read two years of council minutes, and tell a buyer what the pattern suggests. Say that on the page. It is the reason to call you, and it fits naturally where a generic page would have put a form.
Keeping the pages current
Rules change and reports expire. The BC depreciation report deadlines land in 2026 and 2027. Local rental caps get revised. Building costs move every year.
Put one recurring reminder on the calendar to reread both pages, check any date or dollar figure against its source, and update what moved. Twenty minutes, twice a year. A page that quietly went stale is worse than no page, because a buyer who acts on an out-of-date rule blames the agent who published it.
The takeaway
Write the condo page and the house page separately, because the two buyers are researching different risks and typing different searches. Give the condo buyer real answers on fees, the depreciation report or reserve study, special assessments, and the rules that break deals after an offer. Give the house buyer the age and cost of the expensive parts. The page that names the specific thing a buyer is worried about is the page that earns the call, and it is also the page an AI assistant can quote.
