You can have my grill

[timwinters]

There's also the busybody that has nothing better to do than wander the neighborhood with his covenant in hand, peering into backyards and generating lists of perceived "grievances" to file with the HOA every month.

Agreed. There's two sides to every coin.

 

[SixPapaCharlie]

I would rather have the HOA than not Have one.

 

[Matthew]

I've owned houses in a neighborhood with and without. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. It really depends on your own attitude and the attitudes of the neighbors. At my non HOA 'hood, everyone really was concientious about keeping up their property and removing eyesores. At my HOA house there were some people who didn't, then would complain the loudest when reminded about the agreement they signed.

 

[N747JB]

HOA's are a breeze, COA's are the real treat! Our condo in Destin is a great example, I am on the board and I believe in getting along with everyone and the rules apply to EVERYONE. Our president, who rents his unit out 80% of the time thinks he's the dictator of all things condo! And he applies the rules based on whether or not he likes the person involved! We have a no trailer rule for the parking lot, as do most condos, not much space and in the summer it's tight enough parking cars. Well last year one of the owners pulled his boat in the parking lot long enough to get it detailed, 2 maybe 3 hours tops. Our Furher went off on him, blasting him about the rules and that he wasn't special etc. The guy calmly moved his boat and sold his condo a month later. The president doesn't seem to care when the folks he rent to bring their trailers and leave them all week.
Anyway, our unit is for sale and we've bought a house!

 

[denverpilot]

It's not like people don't know the HOA exists and have restrictive covenant authority when they're looking at and buying their house. If you don't like HOAs then don't buy here.



Buying a home in a nice neighborhood with an HOA and then raising hell and being a general malcontent afterwards takes a special type of jerk.



I know the type well, I bought a farm from one of them once. He wasn't happy unless he had some sort of fight going on, whether it be with his wife, his co-workers, his neighborhood, or better yet, with all of them!



And he had the pleasure of including me during the purchasing process. I'm sure that made his life complete.

Restrictive covenants are not optional and HOA Boards are OFTEN overrun with doofuses who think they need to "fix" things well beyond the necessary scope of an HOA.

Coercing people into signing contracts they aren't interested in, is a lousy way to make a neighborhood. But a very common one created by the self-centered generations since the Boomers.

Note above "neighborly" attitude. Sorry Tim. Can't agree with ya on this one. HOAs are quite often Chock Full o' Nuts WAY more often than any one nut hurts any neighborhood "defying" them.

In dad's case, they told him to reprint his house. So he color matched some touch up paint and fixed the area under the gutter that was bad. They then continued to demand he repaint it, while none of his neighbors noticed he hadn't, nor thoughts is house looked bad at all. He flipped them the bird for six years while they played legal games. He threw them under the bus using their own by-laws they couldn't be bothered to follow.

To describe how bad his HOA was, they made the local newspaper in an article about Colorado's worst HOAs.

The entire time they fought him, the Board member who didn't like him had huge chunks of tiles completely missing from her roof and all the paint on the front of her garage was peeling off. The photos of that convinced the hired lawyers that they were absolutely going to lose.

The same HOA triggered such a bad reaction from a veteran for "flying a flag without permission" that he called them "Nazis" unfortunately from his work email. (He didn't know better, to use a personal email address, really.). The resulting threats if the Board requesting he be charged with a "hate crime" and a pansy employer, caused him to not be able to pay his rent and move out of the neighborhood after living there as a renter for almost two decades.

It's really easy to lose control of an HOA Board and not be able to do anything about it. We still have friends in the 'hood and they reported that the insane Board member was finally ousted after a very concerted effort to get people, especially absentee owners renting there, to stop giving her their proxy vote, after almost twenty years.

Nobody needs that horsecrap to have a nice neighborhood. Certainly not pushed on them as a mandatory contract just because they want a home there.

It's all a part of the overriding attitude that everyone else is stupid and you (personally) know what's best for everyone. Then it gets concentrated into a clique of bored people with no other life or accomplishments who enjoy the power given them by a contract that wouldn't stand up to scrutiny in any other business venture.

Coerced to sign it, the rest of the neighborhood has little choice but to put up with the self-important morons who enjoy Board meetings. Or waste considerable personal time to rid themselves of the idiots.

The "property value" excuse for HOAs is really weak, at best. Only in really well run ones is it even a factor.

Some of the most fun you can have with your pants on is to run an HOA bankrupt hiring lawyers and then have other folks run for the Board saying that the previous dummies ran it out of money by ignoring the priorities it was created for. Seriously. If you can read by-laws, it only takes an hour or so per week and the dumber the Board, the longer they'll drag it out, sealing their own fate in the process.

The typical Board member who can't retain enough focus on the important stuff and lets it get personal with specific homeowners, aren't usually students of strategy or chess. Let's just put it that way...

I think dad just wanted to see how dumb they really were. Not once in that six years did he let the paint on his house look shabby. But he refused to fully repaint just to see how intolerable and stupid the one Board member really was. She ranked right up there with some of the dumbest I've ever seen.

 

[denverpilot]

It's not like people don't know the HOA exists and have restrictive covenant authority when they're looking at and buying their house. If you don't like HOAs then don't buy here.

That's always the false pretense of the HOA world... That there's an option.

A study by a local Amateur Radio group here showed that not just in the city, but fully 98% of ALL new housing built in Colorado in the last TWENTY years has had an attached, mandatory, restrictive covenant contract attached to it.

There's no NEW housing that's been built since the 1990s in the ENTIRE STATE where one can make the choice of whether one wants a covenant and HOA, or not.

It's a little white lie.

 

[timwinters]

OTOH...

About 15 years ago now I bought a house in nice development that had 3 acre lots and restrictive covenants.

There was a vacant lot behind me so I tried to buy it. Made the guy who owned it an offer and he just laughed at me. "I paid almost twice that for it," he said. He was a wannabe house builder and planned to build a spec house on it.

About a year later I see him laying out a footprint with string line so I go over to meet him. He has the plans for the house on the tailgate of his truck. I'm talking to him and he's flipping through the plans showing me what he's going to build.

Me: "Is that where you plan to put the house?" I asked pointing to the sting lines.

He: "Yeah"

Me: "Well, it looks like you're only about ten feet from my property line. The setback is 75'"

He: "But that would put me 4' deep in the floodplain."

Me: "Sorry, that ain't my problem. BTW, this house looks like it's only about 2,000SF. The deed restriction requires 2,500 minimum."

He: "2,000' is all I need."

Me: "Sorry, that ain't my problem. BTW, this looks like vinyl or wood siding, the deed restrictions call for masonry. Either brick or stone or a combo. Oh, and the roof has to have at least three different level changes, not counting the garage, looks like this is a straight gable."

He: "I can't afford to do all that!'

Me: (yep, you guessed it) "sorry, that ain't my problem."

Six months later I was closing on the purchase of that lot...for less than I had originally offered.



Had a nice six acres that was a big triangle, built three roughly 25' diameter greens and had a fun little three hole par three around the perimeter! (Nothing in the deed restrictions about that! )

 

[denverpilot]

For the record: Folks may be surprised to hear me say that this is one area where government should have been and stayed involved. Municipal codes are usually reasonable and have some form of redress when they're not. A signed contract where you hand over your property maintenance and upkeep requirements to an elected list of doofuses who aren't qualified to do the job, is dumber than dealing with a county or city government.

And driving home I realized I forgot to ask Bryan the key question to edu-ma-cate him on HOA fines.

So they can fine you. Cool. Think about what they have to do to collect. In most cases they have no standing without a lawsuit to compel you to pay them anything. Not even the dues. They can place a lien against the property but if you're going to be there for ten years, who cares? Negotiate it at the end of owning the property and get it from the sale price. It's really rare to see a judge allow them in most States to go any further than a lien. There won't be any wage garnishment or anything like that.

Now that said, a good HOA that's smart will offer something worthwhile to get owners to pay up.

Ours collects almost all of their annual dues on dumpster day. No one pays any attention to them at all, the rest of the year. If you pay up, you can dump whatever you like and they keep the dumpsters rolling until no one has anything left to get rid of. A similar sized load to the local dump will run twice the price of the mass roll-off.

When I fenced in two acres I followed their rules (and put off building the fence) attempting to contact the "architectural committee" (which is one seventy plus year old retired civil engineer). I gave up asking at the third attempt to reach him and sent a registered letter stating that I would be building on X date and here's the drawing. If nothing received by then, I will assume the fence is approved as designed.

Should have sent that as the first letter out here, I've learned. He rarely returns calls. He and the HOA have also allowed multiple encroachments into community horse trails by fence builders. Ans they do absolutely nothing about it.

I set mine back appropriately (the setback is also designed to allow bucket truck access to the poles) and said screw it.

I suspect the owners of the properties that encroach the trails know what I posted above... The HOA has no teeth nor way to even get to them. Especially the retirees. They can take their fines from the Estate after they're dead. LOL

 

[Lindberg]

So they can fine you. Cool. Think about what they have to do to collect. In most cases they have no standing without a lawsuit to compel you to pay them anything. Not even the dues. They can place a lien against the property but if you're going to be there for ten years, who cares? Negotiate it at the end of owning the property and get it from the sale price. It's really rare to see a judge allow them in most States to go any further than a lien. There won't be any wage garnishment or anything like that.

Not Colorado, but some states have non-judicial foreclosure, including Texas. Many people have lost their homes because they thought the HOA couldn't do anything to collect its dues.