The Monthly Assessment at Montebello: The Rate, and the Documents That Set It

How much is the monthly assessment at Montebello?

The operator's building record publishes a rate of $1.04 per square foot per month for this building. On that rate a 4,000 square foot home carries about $4,160 a month, a 5,000 square foot home $5,200, and a 6,000 square foot home about $6,240.

One individual figure is on the record and it lands in the same place. A 4,848 square foot home in this building was reported paying $4,993 a month, which divides out at $1.03 per square foot. That is one home rather than a survey, and this page says so plainly: it is a check on the published rate, not a second measurement of it.

Neither figure is your figure. The rate is a building rate and the amount your own home pays is stated on its resale certificate, which is a document the association issues on request.

Why is the assessment a rate on floor area rather than a flat charge?

Because the recorded declaration says so, and Texas law obliges it to say something. Texas law requires a condominium declaration to allocate a fraction or percentage of the common elements and the common expenses to each home, and to state the formulas used to establish those allocations, and it requires common expenses to be assessed against each home in line with the liability that allocation gives it. What the statute does not do is choose the formula. Per home, per square foot, or by any other measure is the declaration's decision, and at Montebello the outcome is a rate on floor area.

You can see the allocation itself without opening the declaration, because the county's certified appraisal roll publishes each home's undivided interest in the common land and elements alongside its address. The 93 condominium accounts recorded at this building carry interests running from about two thirds of one percent upward, and they sum to 1.0013. That is not an error: the statute contemplates exactly this, because the sums of those interests must equal one, allowing for minor variations due to rounding.

One warning that follows from the same records. The architect describes 360,000 square feet of building, and the floor areas the county records across the 93 homes total 317,435 square feet. The difference is lobby, corridor, plant and garage. Dividing the building's size by its number of homes produces an average that describes no home in it, and the roll's own range runs from 1,991 to 6,212 square feet.

What does the assessment at Montebello cover?

The operator's building record lists building and grounds, an activities manager, cable television, concierge, an on site guard, a porter, valet parking, a private garage, limited access, an intrusion alarm system, the clubhouse, a lounge, the gym, recreational facilities, an outdoor kitchen, a pet run, storage outside the home, common area insurance, trash removal, and water and sewer.

That is a staffed building rather than a maintained one, and the staffing is most of the cost. It is also the part of the number that is hardest to compare between towers, because two buildings quoting similar rates can be paying for quite different services.

What the list does not include is anything inside your own front door. Interior repairs, your own insurance on the home's contents and improvements, and utilities beyond water and sewer are yours.

Has the assessment at Montebello gone up?

The series below looks as though it has roughly doubled, and it has not. This is the median monthly assessment reported on homes that sold in each year, so it follows which homes sold rather than what the rate did. In a building charging by the square foot, a year in which two large homes changed hands produces a high median and a year of smaller homes produces a low one.

Read it beside the median sale price for the same years and the pattern is obvious: the years with the highest reported assessments are the years the most expensive, and therefore the largest, homes sold. What the series does establish is the order of magnitude an owner should expect, and that assessments here have been in four figures a month throughout the decade.

The tax rate column is a different kind of figure again. It is the median rate recorded against homes sold in that year, not the building's own rate and not any one home's, and 2018 records none because only one home sold.

How does the assessment at Montebello compare with another Houston tower?

On the one measure that is published for both buildings by the same source, Montebello is the cheaper of the two per square foot. The same operator record publishes $1.15 per square foot per month for The Huntingdon on Kirby Drive, against $1.04 here, a difference of about ten percent. On a 5,000 square foot home that is roughly $550 a month.

Take the comparison only as far as it goes. The two buildings do not cover the same things: Montebello's list includes cable television and an activities manager, and The Huntingdon's includes a courtesy patrol and partial utilities. A rate that buys more is not the same rate.

The comparison is still worth making before you set an asking price, because a buyer weighing two staffed towers is comparing carrying costs, and this is the figure they will find.

Which documents state the assessment, and where are they?

Three documents, and two of them are public. The recorded declaration holds the formula: it was filed with the Harris County Clerk on 22 March 2002 under file number V678674, and seven further condominium instruments follow it, the last recorded as RP-2018-106990 in March 2018. The county roll agrees on the count from an entirely separate direction, because every one of the 93 accounts carries a legal description ending in the seventh amendment.

The second public document is the management certificate, which Texas requires to be recorded and indexed as such: the association filed its own management certificate as RP-2026-58595 on 17 February 2026. Anyone can look up either instrument by its number in the county's real property search, though reading the image itself needs a registered account.

The third is the one that answers your question, and it is not public. The resale certificate is issued by the association and states this home's own periodic assessment, the association's managing agent if it has one, and every fee payable on a transfer. Texas law is specific about the terms: the association must supply one within ten days of a written request, it must have been prepared no earlier than three months before it is delivered, and the association may charge up to $375 for it. Order it early.

Is Montebello approved for FHA financing?

This page does not say, because approval is a status that changes and only one source is authoritative on any given day. Check it yourself on HUD's condominium lookup, which is the list you read on the day it matters, and read it again before you rely on it.

The reason to check rather than assume runs in both directions. A buyer told a building is not approved often concludes that FHA financing is unavailable there, and that is wrong: single-unit approval exists for a home in a project that is not on the approved list, provided the project is complete, holds at least five homes, and is not under an adverse determination. The letter that introduced the process limits single-unit approvals to ten percent of a project's homes, quoting HUD's own handbook, and for projects with fewer than ten homes the ceiling is two insured mortgages.

The conditions people usually attach to that ten percent belong elsewhere and are worth reading in the right place. Owner occupancy levels, the share of a project that may carry insured mortgages, reserve funding and the amount of commercial floor area are all set by the federal rule itself, each as a range with the working figure set by notice. For a seller the practical point is smaller than all of this: whether a buyer can use FHA financing here changes the size of your buyer pool, and it is a question to settle in the first week rather than the last.

What can this page not tell you?

It cannot tell you your own home's monthly assessment. Only the resale certificate does that, and this site has not read yours.

It cannot tell you what the association holds in reserve, what it has assessed specially, what its insurance deductible is, or what its accounts show. Those figures reach an agent through a resale certificate delivered in an agency capacity, and this site publishes them for no building.

It cannot tell you what the declaration actually says. The file numbers above come from the county's public index, and the document images sit behind a registered account, so what is stated here is the index rather than the instrument. The execution date of the declaration is not in the index either, only the date it was filed.

It cannot tell you whether the association employs a managing company. That is in the management certificate, and this site has read the index entry rather than the certificate.

It cannot tell you Montebello's FHA status today, and no page can: the answer is on HUD's list at the moment you look.

And it cannot tell you what any of this will be next year. The rate is set by the association, the tax rates are set by taxing units, and both move.