Like Campwoods Grounds, homeowners lease their land; However, here they also own cooperative shares. You will pay an annual maintenance fee of approximately $ 2,800, plus school taxes to the City of North Salem and property taxes to North Salem or the City of Southeast.
The cooperative board has a positive view of those who know someone in the community, said Ms. Rubini. "While they're not a diverse community, we're an open-minded cooperative," she said. Of two people who were rejected, "one was for financial reasons and the other for multiple DWIs."
A mixture of cultures found Diane Tolley, 62, a realtor for Coldwell Banker Realty in Mendham, New Jersey, 30 years ago when she bought a two-bedroom, one-bath cottage on Woodland Lake, a 28-acre cooperative, for $ 78,000 , That was once a summer cottage colony in Mendham, about 32 miles from New York City.
Reasonable real estate prices originally attracted Ms. Tolley, then a single mother with three children, to the cooperative, which at the time had a mix of Jewish and Irish families. “It's Mendham's best kept secret,” she said. She has since moved out of Woodland Lake but has been the broker for subsequent owners of her former home over the years.
None of the 36 homes are for sale now, but a two-bedroom, one-bath home with taxes of $ 4,596 and a monthly maintenance fee of $ 335 was recently sold for $ 257,000.
Over the past six months, the average sales price of a Mendham home outside of the cooperative was $ 922,581 with taxes of about $ 19,000, said Bryan Seavey, a realtor at Turpin Realtors in Mendham. Recent Zillow listings included a two-bedroom, two-bath home valued at $ 439,000 with taxes of approximately $ 8,780 and a nine-bedroom home valued at $ 7,495,000 with a tax charge of $ 127,685.
Mr. Seavey, who is also a contractor, recently renovated and rented five two-bedroom, one-bath cottages in Mendham that he believes were part of a bungalow colony in the 1930s. The houses from the former colony are now only part of the larger Mendham parish, but tend to be cheaper than other houses in the area due to their smaller size.
