It’s a condition of title, it stays with the house.
I would say with inheritance, you’d have the option to sign the agreement or sell the property.
Thanks to the housing crash, the HOA in my old neighborhood is still run by the lackey company of the developer. Started in 2002, the neighorhood was supposed to complete all phases by 2005-2006, but the market started cooling and there are still enough unfinished lots that, to date, we have been unable to get the HOA turned over to the actual home owners.
It’s not too pricey, at $75/yr, but they do not actively seek violations and will flat-out tell you that they are not a policing entity, rather erlying on others to rat out violations to them. From that point, they start writing letters regarding the violations.
Now, the thing that chaps is that, for the $75/yr for a total around $28,000 from all houses, they spend ~$7,500 on “managment fees,” $6,000 on “mailings” and $3,200" on postage.
-They don’t manage ANYTHING, there are no green spaces.
-They mail one colored piece of paper, folded in half, once a year with reminders to pay dues.
Someones pockets are seriously getting lined.
Hmmm… When I was househunting in Calgary about 5 years ago, nobody mentioned HOA or their fees at all in any of the subdivisions I looked into. You mean those places like Tuscany or Copperfield with nice neat new half-million dollar single-family homes wanted people to pay an extra monthly fee for the privilege of being told what to do with their house? Yikes! Sure glad I didn’t buy there.
So they don’t have to live near people who are not like themselves.
When my son wanted to paint his house red (a dull red in fact), he first became president of his HOA, then appointed some friends to the architecture committee, got formal permission and painted his house. However, he is still president (no one else wanted to paint his house red, I guess) several years later.
This is a real problem that I can relate to. With my first house purchase, I didn’t realize that there was an HOA until the closing. The HOA document was simply “just another document” among many that appeared in front of me for my signature. I can certainly understand that people in the excitement of getting the keys to their new house are not going to sit there and try to absorb a 50-age HOA agreement while the banker and seller twiddle their thumbs waiting on you. Even if people read it, it probably wouldn’t matter anyway since buyers are already emotionally committed to buying the house.
I lucked out because the HOA in this neighborhood was invisible. If it wasn’t for the yearly invoices, I wouldn’t know or remember that we had an HOA.
If you state it like that, it looks illogical. However, that’s not the whole picture. You’re also not considering that non-HOA homeowners also “pay extra” in the form of lower resale value. Let’s entertain the thought that elimination of HOAs is what people truly want and because they desperately desire it, they will pay a premium to have freedom from an HOA. Well, a neighborhood should be able to convince themselves that they will increase the value of all their homes by $10k or more if they vote out the HOA. Their neighborhood will become a magnet for all those buyers trying to avoid HOAs. I don’t believe such an experiment would be successful. People complain about HOAs but they don’t actually put their money where there mouth is. The dirty fact is that if you force your neighbors to conform to baseline standards of presentation, your home’s resale value is “protected.” This is why HOA restrictions don’t disappear.
I’m not an expert on the entire history of HOAs but my understanding is that it arises out of a basic need to maintain (e.g. landscape) common areas of a planned subdivision. A legal entity can be created for this purpose. Conveniently, the neighborhood can “piggyback” onto this legal entity and add covenants, rules, restrictions on the properties. Obviously, this is the part that is distasteful.
I guess you can theoretically have HOA restrictions with zero common areas to maintain. Is there such a thing? Even condos in without any grass on their property still have to polish the floors around the elevators and such, right? (I’ve never lived in a condo.)
[quote=Ruminator;12862231This is a real problem that I can relate to. With my first house purchase, I didn’t realize that there was an HOA until the closing. The HOA document was simply “just another document” among many that appeared in front of me for my signature. I can certainly understand that people in the excitement of getting the keys to their new house are not going to sit there and try to absorb a 50-age HOA agreement while the banker and seller twiddle their thumbs waiting on you. Even if people read it, it probably wouldn’t matter anyway since buyers are already emotionally committed to buying the house.[/quote]
The law says that HOA documents must be provided in advance of closing (not sure how far in advance).
Well you can’t contract to do illegal things, this is why not everything in the HOA contract is enforceable. For instance, you can put an antenna on your roof. This is legal everywhere despite what any HOA says.
Here’s the thing though, if you were to put up an antenna and fight the HOA and win, then what? What then is you better darn well be prepared to live to the letter of the contract in every other way, 'cause they will look for reasons to pick at you.
This was Florida in 1995 so I may be hazy on the exact sequence of events. Maybe they sent it to me in the thick packet of documents and I overlooked it. Maybe it was faxed to me in the morning before closing (I remember some faxes that morning). All I remember for sure was that I was surprised by it.
That depends. Our complex is extremely diverse. We’ve got every imaginable type of person/family. Every race, every religion, every sexual orientation.
Of course, I live in a suburb of San Francisco, so it would be hard to find a neighborhood that does not have those characteristics.
You have to own the roof first. In many HOAs, you only own the air inside your living space. Everything else, from the wiring in your walls to the grass between buildings, is common area.
Also, even if you do own your roof, an HOA can still restrict an antenna’s placement (“not visible from the street” is a popular clause) as long as it’s not significantly more expensive to do so and the resulting TV reception isn’t unreasonably degraded. (FCC rules)
This, in my opinion, is where the problem arises. As HOAs become more and more common, it will become harder and harder to purchase a decent home that is not subject to an HOA. So we could end up with a society where everyone is practically forced to sign away some of their basic rights to a de facto local government that doesn’t fall under the constitutional constraints of true elected government.
I don’t know how this can be legally prevented, but I do find it troubling.
IANAL, but can an HOA truly deny someone an inheritance if they refuse to sign a contract? And if they don’t sign a contract then can the rules really be enforced against them?
This logic doesn’t follow. It’s also legal to install a blue and pink striped storm door, replace my cedar shake roof with asphalt shingles, park a pickup truck in front of my house, and paint a religious symbol on my own driveway but these are things that HOAs can legally prevent you from doing.
An HOA cannot compel you to do something that is illegal. That is different than prohibiting you from doing something that is otherwise legal.
Well, if your Dear Aunt who lives in a non-HOA area dies and leaves you her house, you still have to sign various paperwork, right? There are legal actions to transfer the property to you, in accordance with her will. So if you didn’t sign those papers, you wouldn’t get Dear Aunt’s bungalow either.
This is just one more legal paper.
That’s how title works - so that conditions like this can be enforced regardless of who owns the property.
It’s also not unique to HOAs. If a utility company or neighbor gets an easement from the original owner, the heir is just as bound by the easement as the original owner was.
In fact, the whole reason for title searches and title insurance while purchasing a property is because something attached to title can be enforced against you even if you didn’t know about it when you bought the property.
And I’m not sure why people are so surprised by this. There are rules governing the use of virtually everything you own. Motor oil can only be disposed of in certain ways. Pesticides and cleaners must be used in accordance with label instructions. Guns must be licensed and used in proper places. Same with cars. Those tags on your mattresses must be left intact. Computers and software must be used in accordance with the EULA.
“Freedom” has never been defined by any government as “Do whatever the heck you want.”
But is it just one more legal paper? Calling something “one more legal paper” doesn’t somehow give it some special status. As I say, IANAL, but I wonder if you can be denied the inheritance simply for refusing to sign this one particular paper.
You’re not forced to sign a contract, the covenant just runs with the deed.
Basically, you can’t own property in the US. You can only own rights in property - it’s a legal fiction. So, if I own a piece of land and sell the right to use the road that runs through it to some guy, when I sell you the property, I’m really just selling you the rights to the property. One of the rights in property is the right to prevent other people from using the land. But I can’t transfer to you the right to prevent that person from using that road, because I don’t have the right - I sold it. And no one can transfer to another something that they don’t have.
So, the rights in property that the owner of home in an HOA has are not the same as the rights in property that another home owner may have. In one way, you could think of it like one right they don’t have is the right not to be in that HOA. And since they can’t convey what they don’t have - you can’t inherit the right not to be in the HOA. Either way, the HOA is tied to the property, not the owener. Unless the contract, deed, whatever, is different.
That applies to retailers, not to consumers. You can remove the tags once you buy the mattress. 