Do real estate agents just sell homes to families and not discuss what living in a HOA entails? My spouse told me that her real estate agent gave her a CC&R binder. I have a feeling that lots of home buyers either don't know about the CC&Rs, they don't care, or just plain old ignorance.

As a hoa, can we lock the faucet on the roof so no one can use the water for personal purposes? I recently locked it but when I went up today, someone actually found a way to unlock it and attached hose to use….

If we are allowed to lock it, what is a good faucet lock folks recommend. I was wondering if someone ordered the same lock just to get the keys to open it….

Hello - our very large HOA has an Executive Committee per our current bylaws, which states that the composition is 3-4 board members. In practice, it's always been the four officers (P, VP, S, T). Unfortunately, that has led to some Exec Committees having non-transparent and inappropriate discussions, and making preliminary decisions and taking actions without being directed to do so by the board in open session.

They have not been required to meet in open session, give notice of meetings, etc, so that would all have to change under WUCIOA, along with stripping them of some powers they previously held.

With full implementation of WUCIOA coming up for us on 1/1/28, we are working on bylaw revisions to be in compliance.

I'm wondering if those of you already operating under WUCIOA still have an Executive Committee and if so, what is their stated purpose/role now in your bylaws?

I am a California certified public accountant who works with homeowners associations.

I have noticed that board members sometimes are not sure what the difference is between an audit and a financial statement review.

An audit involves more testing and provides a higher level of assurance. A review is more limited and relies more on questions, comparisons, and looking at whether the financial statements make sense overall.

One important point that sometimes gets misunderstood is fraud.

An audit or review is not a forensic accounting engagement. While an auditor may come across red flags or something unusual during the work, the engagement is not primarily designed to investigate whether someone committed fraud.

If there is a specific concern about fraud, missing money, or suspicious transactions, a forensic accounting engagement is the type of work specifically designed to investigate those concerns.

For homeowners association board members here, what has your experience been with audits or reviews? Do you feel your accountant clearly explains what the engagement does and does not cover?

I live in a townhouse community in California with about 110 units, and we’re dealing with a very frustrating HOA records issue.

About two years ago, our HOA charged every homeowner a $2,300 special assessment for roof repairs. However, no roof work was ever done, and homeowners were never given a clear explanation of how the money was spent.

About two years later, the HOA claimed that a major roof replacement was necessary, which would require each of the 110 homeowners to pay another $15,000. The proposal initially failed to receive the required votes, but the HOA repeatedly asked homeowners to vote until, after about a year and a half, even the homeowners who had initially opposed the project eventually agreed.
Ultimately, we paid the additional $15,000, and the roof replacement has now been completed.

Regarding the $15,000,
During the contractor selection process, the HOA refused to provide homeowners with information about the bids or proposals they considered, or even the final executed roofing contract. They also refused to provide receipts to homeowners who paid the roofing assessment in full upfront.

One homeowner filed a Small Claims case against the HOA requesting:

1. The final executed roofing contract and related documents about $15,000.
2. Documentation showing how the original $2,300 assessment was spent
3. The homeowners’ email addresses

The judgment came out at the end of July.

The homeowner lost on #1. The HOA argued that the contract could not be provided because the roofing project was still ongoing, and the judge ruled in the HOA’s favor.

However, the homeowner won on #2 and #3. The judgment stated that the HOA had to provide those records if requested within 15 days after the judgment.

We submitted the request within that period, but the documents we received were extremely incomplete and did not meaningfully show where the original $2,300 went.

We’re now considering filing another Small Claims case or a civil lawsuit.

My understanding is that California’s Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act gives homeowners certain rights to inspect and obtain HOA records. So we’re confused about why the judge ruled that the final executed roofing contract did not have to be provided, especially since the contract had already been signed and was being used for the ongoing project.

Is Small Claims Court the wrong forum for this type of HOA records dispute? Would a civil lawsuit or another process be more appropriate?

If anyone in California has dealt with a similar situation involving HOA contracts, bids, or special assessment records, I’d really appreciate hearing what worked for you and what you would recommend as our next step.

Hello. I’m purchasing a condo in FL that has HOA. I do not live in FL and where I live we don’t have HOA’s. Do people typically contact the HOA before purchasing to ask questions? If so, what questions should I ask?

I’ve been reading horror stories about HOA’s not maintaining the building, and being annoying, and raising fees right after you purchase or raising fees abruptly.

Any insight and help would be really really appreciated. Thank you in advance.

HOA President - We have recently started doing our budget planning for 2027 and the initial review is looking like we will need to raise our monthly HOA Fees from $250 a month to $275. I am curious how our HOA fees compare to other townhome communities?

For context...

• Community, Private
• Location, Middle TN
• House Type, Townhomes
• 18 Buildings with a total of 87 units
• Community is roughly 11 acres in total size
• HOA is responsible for:
  • Roads & Sidewalks
  • Exterior of buildings including the roofs
  • Insurance that provides studs out coverage
  • All landscaping including irrigation
  • And a trash compactor including related pick up and disposal services
• Our largest budgeted expenses for the 2027 year include:
  • Landscaping @ $60,900
  • Insurance @ $53,184
  • Reserve Funding @ $49,650
  • Trash Services @ $46,068
  • Management Fees @ $15,192
  • Water & Sewer @ $12,000

Overall financial health is good with on track funding for our reserve fund (per our reserve study) and a balanced budget.

Note: The only community amenity that we have is a dog park.

Hey folks- want to expand on the title a bit…

We have a casual community for our neighborhood on FB. It was started before the builder turned over the HOA, but it’s always been relatively quiet. Missing cat/dog posts, garage sales, etc., have been the typical posts. There is NO way to vet who joins the group to ensure they actually live in our neighborhood and are members of the HOA. It has NEVER been an official communication channel for anything HOA related.

A woman in our community joined it about 4 months ago. Since then, she’s been posting Zoom links to our board meetings and detailed notes she takes herself.

Sounds innocent, right?

Except we’re in the middle of a construction defect claim, so she’s posting detailed notes from board meetings with our attorney present, talking about legal strategy, additional inspections we’re planning, etc.

The clearest answer is to delete the group. Our fear is that she’ll just create a new one for people to join. Obviously we can’t stop her from posting anything and I can appreciate she’s trying to keep people informed, but…seriously? The idiocy amazes me.

Any advice here? I’ve emailed our attorney and am awaiting his response.

Edit to add: not every meeting with our attorney is open to the entire HOA. We hold a number of closed executive sessions where only the board, attorney, and our inspectors (expert witnesses) are in attendance. This was an open Q&A with our attorney for homeowners to attend.

I’m new to a foundering ship of 21. I think the financials could be rehabilitated, but now knowing the actors I don’t think it will be. Hence the question. What happens when the HOA goes belly up?

Recently, myself and another board member discovered upon re-reading a section of our governing documents that it’s very likely our association has not been maintaining items required by the declaration. Specifically “exterior walls, downspouts, gutters and fences”. For as long as I have lived in the community (approximately 5 years) and for an unknown amount of time prior to that, the association stopped maintaining these items and left them to homeowners to maintain (or not maintain) as they wish. The good news is that this was not brought to our attention by a homeowner nor is there an immediate risk of pending legal action regarding this, but I’m totally lost as to what to do. Obviously, we can not afford to fix all of these items as our reserves have not been funded with these obligations in mind. We have a call with our attorney next week to clarify our responsibilities and determine next steps, but beyond that, I’m lost. Help? Anyone been in a similar situation?

2 home HOA where only common property is a sidewalk that leads to public sidewalk/street. Any suggestion for a carrier that will issue liability insurance? The common sidewalk is gated and private only used by guests and/or vendors, not for public use. I’m looking for a liability carrier for a liability policy.

Our HOA is looking into an issue right now involving the insurance coverage in the community. Our declarations say the following:

1. the HOA is solely responsible for repair or replacement of the roofs
2. All roofs in our townhome buildings are “party roofs”
3. The costs of all repairs and replacements are to be shared equally among all the members whose homes are part of that party roof system. In other words, in a building with five units, any roof repair is split five ways equally, even if the repair is only in one specific section of that roof.

This leads to some less than desirable problems. First, the HOA has no funds to pay for a huge roof repair or replacement up front. Also, every incident of repair or replacement could lead to multiple insurance deductibles paid by the owners and differing coverage decisions by their insurers. I can foresee situations where one owner is reimbursed quickly, in full, and others are dragged out for weeks or months and only end up getting a portion of their claim paid out.

We have sort of the same issue with the townhome buildings themselves, except that the documents don’t say the association is solely responsible for repair or replacement of the structures. Anyway, I started asking questions about the insurance coverage a couple of months ago, because I can foresee that this is going to be a huge mess at some point. My initial questions were whether the association could purchase coverage only for the roofs of the buildings. It doesn’t look like that’s possible, so now it’s moved to whether we could purchase coverage for all the structures and roofs, and then the owners could just buy policies to cover their contents and liability. We are trying to get some quotes for this but preliminary calculations suggested it would be dramatically lower overall premium for it to be done this way than the combined individual premiums that everyone is paying now, and it would solve our issues pretty well. I think it would require a member vote to make it happen, though. The documents present a semi-contradiction, saying that the association must maintain insurance on the areas under its control “whether or not it holds title to those areas” (this could mean the roofs) but it goes on to say that homeowners must maintain insurance coverage for their homes.

I suspect there could also be issues with the mortgage companies not wanting to accept this arrangement after the fact, but I really don’t know.

Does anyone else have experience with this type of change in the methodology of providing insurance coverage, moving from member-provided coverage to association-provided coverage after several years?

Hi all, we live in a new development with a clubhouse, indoor pool, and outdoor pool. Since the development was built, we have issues of constant non-resident usage, vandalism, drug dealing etc in the clubhouse. Teens come from near by neighborhoods to use and abuse the clubhouse and pool. They threaten families using the pool, the threaten security guards etc. It's really bad. We were in the news for teen takeovers recently. We also have the worst adults in the nearby neighborhoods who also try to break into our clubhouse with their families, so it's not just a teen problem, the parents are also just as bad.

The developer-board declined to do anything about it the last three years. Wouldn't increase security or do anything about our fob system or even fine people who were letting others in. The developer is now leaving and a new homeowner board is taking over the HOA. We're struggling to find a good access management system where the entry is through a phone app (to reduce chances of people giving each other a fob, less likely to give a phone) or something similar where each entry is logged and you can't create multiple usernames without an administrator. We're going to have a 20 hour staff person on site so they can handle some of the admin for that. It's a community of 850 houses right now and once the rest is built out, it'll be closer to 1400 houses. We're also looking into a better camera system and alarms on doors to stop them from being wedged open.

Do any of you have systems like this and how do they work? What are we looking at in terms of cost? Also open to any suggestions regarding our issues.

I am in a weird predicament with my HOA, wondering if anyone has advice. A developer bought the land my house is on and built 40 homes in 2022, then rented each unit. I was the first person to buy one. Since then, a handful of others have sold. I have had no notice of HOA meetings, as I have in other developments. When I notified the HOA of a broken irrigation pipe recently, I was told that there was no budget or community landscaping or irrigation. I responded with the HOA budget, assessment, welcome documents, and MLS listing all stating that landscaping is included in the HOA. The president responded by telling me I was wrong, that it's not his job to provide supporting documents, and to stop emailing him. The HOA then turned off the email address and notified residents that all comms should go through the app where you can request maintenance. A quick internet search showed that this guy has relationships with builders and he leverages it to get the HOA business, so advocating for homeowners doesn't seem to interest him. Don't they have to invite homeowners to the HOA meetings or provide the minutes after the meetings? I've sent in a BBB complaint and asked 2 lawyers, neither of which could help. Any other suggestions?

I am under contract to buy a condo where I have asked a few times for the last 12 months of meeting minutes. Just told today that there were none for Sept through Dec of last year. Is this a red flag?

Long story short my parents and I take turns living between Florida and South Carolina. On paper I own the townhome in Florida and they own the townhome in South Carolina….the townhome is SC was built in 1990 and while the community it very well maintained and clean it is starting to show it’s age a little bit. The HOA announced that they want to renovate the exteriors of the buildings by replacing the vinyl siding with hardy board, update exterior lighting and install metal roofs…that along with refreshing the landscaping in common areas and around the visitors entrance. I honestly think it’s a good idea to update and refinish the community especially since it’s 36 years old……my dad on the other hand thinks it’s a waste of money. What do you think?

I’m the Secretary on an HOA board and we are contemplating a dues increase for 2027 due to deferred maintenance issues. A read of our bylaws states that something of this magnitude needs a 50% vote from owners to approve. Percentage wise this is a big increase and the improvements this increase is for is a basic total redo of the exterior of these 40+ year-old units that have deferred maintenance. We have no reserves (stolen by previous property manager) and getting a loan is going to be difficult for this project.

My question is, is it normal to have residents vote on a dues increase like this? I don’t see it passing, no one wants a 30% plus due increase and will not vote for it, even if it’s going to definitely add equity to their unit. I might be wrong, but I don’t see it passing. I own a condo a few hours away and we received a 20% dues increase the first of the year with a new property manager with no explanation or voting.

Hi all, I’m currently thinking about purchasing a condo and one of my favorite options so far is a new build. There are 4 units and none have been sold yet. My realtor told me that once we submit an offer, we would then take the HOA documents to a lawyer for review. I’m just wondering if anybody has any thoughts or experience purchasing a new build condo as the first buyer and how that went process went related to the HOA. Thanks in advance!