Why McKinney's Cheapest-Looking HOA Fee Can Be the Most Expensive One

A few years back, a McKinney real estate agent watched a sale nearly collapse at the closing table. Her clients had lived in Craig Ranch for years, priced their home at $600,000, and accepted an offer. Then the settlement statement arrived with a line item they had forgotten existed: a $2,250 fee owed to the Craig Ranch Community Association, due at closing, simply for having sold. According to the agent, Louann Smith, "they almost didn't close." They had signed off on the fee years earlier when they bought the house. They just never expected it to show up the day they sold it.

That fee has a name: the Community Enhancement Fee. And it points to something buyers comparing McKinney's big master-planned communities rarely think to check. The HOA number on a listing sheet tells you almost nothing about where the real cost of ownership actually lives. In Craig Ranch, Stonebridge Ranch, and Trinity Falls, that cost shows up in three completely different places, and none of them are visible from the monthly dues figure alone.

The fee that hides at the exit

Craig Ranch's monthly HOA dues run around $136, which makes it look like the value play among McKinney's major communities. But that number only covers what happens while you live there. It says nothing about what happens when you leave.

Under Craig Ranch's governing documents, sellers owe a Community Enhancement Fee equal to 0.25 percent of the first $300,000 of the sale price, then 0.5 percent of everything above that. On a $600,000 home, that works out to the $2,250 the agent's clients discovered at the closing table. On a $1 million home, it climbs past $3,750. The fee scales with the sale price, which means the more a home has appreciated since purchase, the more it costs its owner to sell.

John Palmer, vice president of the Craig Ranch Community Association, has defended the fee as a way to keep funds available for community programs and improvements without leaning on the annual operating budget, saying it exists "to keep our community differentiated, well-capitalized and relevant over time." That may be a reasonable long-term funding strategy for the association. It also means the true cost of owning in Craig Ranch is not fully knowable until the day you decide to sell, and by then it is too late to shop around.

The fee that hides in the future

Stonebridge Ranch tells a different story. The community's 2026 annual assessment landed at $1,053, a modest number for a 5,000-acre master-planned community with more than 70 distinct villages and roughly 9,400 homes. On paper, that looks like the most reasonable of the three.

The catch is that Stonebridge Ranch is old enough that its original amenities are starting to age out all at once. In early 2025, the Stonebridge Ranch Community Association proposed its first special assessment in the community's 36-year history, a renovation of the Beach Club estimated at $10 million to $12 million. Homeowner Brandley, quoted by CBS Texas at the time, said residents had heard estimates "anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500 per home." The association had not finalized a number as of that report, and the exact figure homeowners were ultimately billed may differ, but the mechanism is the clear takeaway: when a community's amenities were all built in the same decade, they tend to need replacement in the same decade too, and the bill arrives as a lump sum rather than a gradual line-item increase.

That is the opposite risk profile from Craig Ranch. Instead of a known, calculable cost at the exit, Stonebridge Ranch carries an unknown, lump-sum cost that can appear at almost any point during ownership, tied to the age of shared infrastructure rather than the sale of any individual home.

The fee that just tells you upfront

Trinity Falls, McKinney's newer master-planned community on the north side of the city, offers a useful contrast. Its Master Association charges a flat $1,572 annual assessment, billed quarterly at $393, with an additional $250 monthly maintenance fee for townhome owners. There is no enhancement fee at sale. There is no multi-decade backlog of aging amenities yet, because the community itself is not old enough to have one.

That simplicity is genuinely useful for a buyer trying to budget. It also comes with an honest caveat: Trinity Falls hasn't been around long enough to know how it will handle large-scale amenity replacement when its pools, trails, and clubhouses eventually need it. The absence of a special assessment history isn't proof the community has solved the problem Stonebridge Ranch is now facing. It just means Trinity Falls hasn't reached that point in its life cycle yet.

Three communities, three different places to hide a cost

Put side by side, the monthly or annual number on a listing sheet is doing three different jobs depending on which community you're looking at. In Craig Ranch, it's a partial answer. In Stonebridge Ranch, it's a stable-looking number sitting on top of a community that just demonstrated it can bill homeowners a four-figure lump sum with little warning. In Trinity Falls, it's closer to the full picture, mostly because the community hasn't lived long enough to test it.

What to actually ask before you write an offer

None of this means one community is a better or worse choice than another. It means the comparison buyers are actually making when they look at three HOA numbers side by side isn't the comparison they think they're making. Before writing an offer in any McKinney master-planned community, it's worth asking:

• Does this HOA charge a transfer, resale, or capital contribution fee at closing, and who pays it?
• How old is the community's core amenity package, and has the reserve fund kept pace with replacement costs?
• Has this association levied a special assessment in the past five years, and if so, for what?
• Is the current HOA fee flat, or does it scale with something like sale price or square footage?

These questions rarely show up on a listing printout, but the HOA resale certificate and governing documents will answer all four, and Texas law entitles a buyer to request them before closing.

A quick note for sellers already in one of these communities

If you already own in Craig Ranch and are weighing a sale, the enhancement fee is a cost worth building into your net proceeds estimate from the start, not discovering at the closing table the way one seller nearly did. If you're in Stonebridge Ranch, it's worth asking the association directly whether any additional special assessments are being discussed beyond the Beach Club project. Either way, the fee structure of your specific community is a fixed fact you can plan around once you know it exists.

FAQ

Do all of McKinney's master-planned communities have a transfer fee like Craig Ranch? No. It's a structure specific to Craig Ranch's governing documents. Stonebridge Ranch and Trinity Falls don't currently charge a comparable seller-paid enhancement fee.

How do I find out about a special assessment history before I buy? Request the HOA resale certificate and recent board meeting minutes during your due diligence period. Both typically disclose any pending or recently levied special assessments.

Is a lower HOA fee always a red flag? Not necessarily. It simply means the fee alone isn't enough information. A lower monthly number can mean genuinely lower costs, or it can mean the cost has been shifted somewhere else in the ownership timeline. The only way to know is to ask.

Comparing three communities by their HOA number is a reasonable place to start, but it's not where the comparison should end. If you're weighing Craig Ranch, Stonebridge Ranch, Trinity Falls, or another McKinney community and want a clear picture of what you'd actually be signing up for, Rhonda Brown can walk through the governing documents with you before you write an offer. Schedule a Consultation to get started.