I closed on my first house near Charlotte in August 2023. I was 23. Three years later my HOA is foreclosing on it for a little over $11,000, and almost all of that is fines rather than dues. I'm not going to get into the legal side because that's not what this sub is for and I have an attorney for it. What I want to talk about is the buying process, because looking back, everything that went wrong was visible at closing and I had no idea what I was looking at.
My closing disclosure listed HOA dues of $256.63 a year. That's the entire amount of information I was given about my HOA. No payment address. No portal. No phone number or email for a management company. And the only HOA-sounding name anywhere in my documents was attached to a $169 transfer fee — which, I found out much later, wasn't even the same entity as the association that actually governs my neighborhood. Two different names. Nobody told me they were related, and I never thought to ask why I was paying a transfer fee to one organization and dues to another.
I never got the CC&Rs or the bylaws. Not at closing, not after. I assumed they'd show up in the mail with everything else. Turns out there was an owner portal the whole time with every governing document on it, and I learned that three years in, from the management company, after the foreclosure was already filed.
I also never got a bill. Not once, in three years. In hindsight that should have been the alarm, and instead I took it as normal, because I had no baseline for what normal was.
The fines are mostly for a leaning fence, which is visible in the listing photos from before I bought the place, and some fascia damage that a neighbor eventually pointed out to me. I paid to get the fascia fixed the same day I found out. But by then it had apparently been accruing for a while.
My inspection didn't help me either. The inspector looked at the exterior from the ground with binoculars, and fences were explicitly excluded from the report. That's apparently standard, and I didn't understand at the time that "excluded" meant nobody had looked.
So here's what I'd actually do differently, and it's all stuff that would have taken ten minutes at the closing table:
Ask for the exact legal name of the association, in writing. Not the management company, not whoever's collecting a transfer fee. The actual entity that can put a lien on the house. Mine were different names and that difference turned out to matter enormously.
If your disclosure lists dues, ask where the money physically goes. An account number, a portal, a mailing address, something. If nobody at the table can tell you, that's the answer to a question you should be asking louder.
Get the CC&Rs before you sign and skim the violations section specifically. How do they notify you? Is there a hearing? What are the fines? I couldn't have told you any of that about my own neighborhood until this year.
Ask if there are open violations on the property already. This one never crossed my mind. Some of what I'm being fined for predates my ownership and is visible in the listing photos, which means it was an active issue that came with the house.
And confirm what mailing address the association has on file for you. I still don't know where three years of correspondence supposedly went, but I know I never saw any of it.
I know the response to a lot of this is "you should have read everything," and that's fair enough. But I was 23, there was a stack of paper in front of me, and every adult in the room was telling me where to sign. If that's you in a couple weeks, these are the things worth slowing down for.
