What is a PUD in real estate? A community where each owner holds the lot and the home in fee simple and an association owns the common areas, the form most Las Vegas master plans take.
A planned unit development is a community in which each owner holds their lot and the home on it in fee simple, and an association owns and maintains the shared parts: the parks, the gates, the private streets, the pools, the landscaped entries. A recorded declaration creates the association, sets the dues and binds every lot inside the boundary it describes. Nevada's common-interest ownership act calls this a planned community, and NRS 116.075 defines one simply as a common-interest community that is not a condominium or a cooperative. The difference from a condominium is what the deed conveys: a lot, rather than a unit plus an undivided interest in the common elements.
Four things change for a buyer. The lender attaches a PUD rider to the deed of trust, acknowledging the association and its dues. There is usually no project warrantability review, because the collateral is a lot and a house rather than a share of a building, which is why a fee-simple townhome is generally simpler to finance than the same building sold as condominiums. The owner insures the whole structure on an ordinary homeowners policy instead of the interior on an HO-6. And the association is still an association: CC&Rs, architectural approval, dues and a lien on the lot when they go unpaid.
Most of the valley's master plans and nearly all of its fee-simple townhomes are planned unit developments, often with two associations, a master over the whole plan and a sub-association over the street. Telling a PUD townhome from a condominium townhome by looking is impossible, because it is the same building. The deed's legal description answers it: a lot and block on a recorded subdivision map is a PUD, a unit number on a condominium map is a condominium. The preliminary title report and the resale package both carry it, and either one settles the question before the inspection period runs out.
A worked example
Two attached three-bedroom townhomes on the same street, both around $360,000. The PUD one conveys lot 42 of a recorded map, dues of $95 a month for the streets and landscaping, and an ordinary homeowners policy at about $1,300 a year covering the whole structure. The condominium one conveys unit 42 with an undivided interest in the common elements, dues of $310 a month because the association carries the roof, the exterior and the master policy, and an HO-6 at about $400 a year. The $215 monthly gap in dues is roughly $32,000 of loan at recent rates, and the insurance runs the other way.
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Questions people ask
Is a PUD the same as an HOA?
No. A PUD is the shape of the community, and the HOA is the entity inside it that owns the common areas and collects the dues. Every PUD has an association, but not every association sits in a PUD, since condominiums have them too.
Do PUDs have lower dues than condos?
Usually, because the association maintains common areas rather than roofs, exteriors and a building's insurance. The trade is that those costs do not disappear: a PUD owner pays for their own roof and their own exterior directly instead of through the dues.