Closing company never provided me with HOA info?

Why do you think the closing company was supposed to collect HOA dues?

Did any of the paperwork you signed or realtor inform you that the property was governed by an HOA?

Was this a foreclosure purchase?


You shouldn't fault the HOA for this first contact. They probably expected that you knew about this and were given information at the purchase.

Since you never received a copy of the governing documents, explain that to the Board and request a copy now.


You would be responsible for any dues from the day you closed on the property forward. Any dues that were assessed prior to your purchase would not be your responsibility.


Typically, the covenants are attached to the Deed. Your title company should have identified that when they researched the property. Your Realtor should have also disclosed this to you prior to closing. Check your States Realtor disclosure laws and if you didn't receive any notice that the property had covenants attached to it, file a complaint with the County/State.

This will not prevent you from being responsible for any assessments due since you purchased the property. However, their might be other options available to you (depending on how long ago the closing date was). I suspect that you could explore those options by checking with a local attorney.

IMPORTANT - DO NOT FAIL TO PAY ANY ASSESSMENTS YOU OWE This should be done in a timely fashion. Otherwise, you will have other issues to deal with. Worst case could include possible foreclosure of the continuing lien on your property the HOA has.

Yes the realtor verbally told me the house was part of a HOA.

No I have not signed or been provided with a single sheet of paper in regards to the HOA... that's what I was saying, not 1 piece of paper at closing with the words HOA on it.

Yes it was a foreclosure.

They didn't know anything about the purchase, the only reason they found out is because I told a board member who stopped by while campaigning for re-election. Oh, and their demands for money have been via email, still not a single sheet of paper from them. (This can hardly be an official notification of owing money, right?)

So at what point and by whom am I supposed to receive a copy of the covenants?
Am I supposed to sign anything acknowledging the covenants and agreeing to them?
To further that... I assume information regarding non-payment is in the covenants, so can they legally put a lien on my house without having provided me documentation stating that's a possibility?

Don't get me wrong, I fully plan on paying next year's dues... I just think it's a really shitty move by them to fail provide me with anything, then demand money a month before Christmas with (I'm assuming) more dues coming up around the beginning of the year. There was no "welcome to the neighborhood" or "hi my name is.." or "if you have any problems with ___ just call this number". Step 1 was DEMAND MONEY!

In our subdivision of private homes, the BOD has NO idea of the selling status of homes - until the foreclosure signs go up or the water/membership bill hasn't been paid, three months after due date.

They have placed liens on 11 homes this year. This is against the current owner, not the new buyer. Sometimes the realtor doesn't know about the non paid dues or liens until he/she shows the house and there's no water!

We have written the realtors whose signs we see up to remind them to notify home buyers that there is a homeowners association.

They have never bothered to get together a Welcome packet of bylaws, etc. for new home buyers.

Depending on what kind of home the OP has, I am not surprised about the events.

The existence of an HOA should have been in the listing.

In our subdivision of private homes, the BOD has NO idea of the selling status of homes - until the foreclosure signs go up or the water/membership bill hasn't been paid, three months after due date.

They have placed liens on 11 homes this year. This is against the current owner, not the new buyer. Sometimes the realtor doesn't know about the non paid dues or liens until he/she shows the house and there's no water!

We have written the realtors whose signs we see up to remind them to notify home buyers that there is a homeowners association.

They have never bothered to get together a Welcome packet of bylaws, etc. for new home buyers.

Depending on what kind of home the OP has, I am not surprised about the events.

The existence of an HOA should have been in the listing.

John:

Lets make this clear. YOU are playing with fire. And in the end your present course of action will only make things worse.

YOU are the property owner. YOU are responsible to pay dues. Hopefully, every other owner pays their dues. Why should you be any different?

Your attempts to place balme on the closing company, title company, HOA OR anyone else but yourself does not matter.

And you comment regarding the HOA's first contact with you as lacking. Well their job is to manage the property on which you live. Not make nice nice with someone who for some reason has decided not to live up to their monetary obligations in paying the cost to maintain your new property. THEIR job is to collect the ides owed from you and every other owner.

You can sit back and do nothing and I would guess the next contact will be from the HOA attorney demanding payment or notification a lien or foreclosure action has been filed against you. Who do you plan to blame at that point?

Good luck and let us know how your behavior worked out for you.

John:

You have more excuses than I care to count. In one post you state the HOA
e-mailed you and now you claim to have no way to contact them. Ever use the reply button? Works really well.

Sorry you didn't get the support you were looking for here. Everyone should pay except you. That's your thought process. The closing company should have collected the dues, they did not so therefore you don't need to pay until next year with the holidays and all coming up. How dare they ask you to pay what you owe.

And then their request didn't suit you. Give me a break.

Do what you have to do and please let us all know what happens. The lien or foreclosure process you might be risking should be no problem for you. I would suggest you take the time to read your documents they might give you some idea of what might be down the road for you.

I find it telling you have the time to post repeatedly on this site but don't have the time to contact the HOA.

Ignorance is not a useful defense in a court of law. And you neighbors views on the HOA, although lining up with yours, don't really carry that much weight.

Keep putting this matter off I'm quite sure it will all work out for you.

John,

I understand that you were not given any written documentation on the HOA. I also understand that apparently there is some sort of requirement for the closing company that they should have collected the first years Assessment from you up front (as part of the closing costs).

By reading your posts, I am also of the understanding that:

1. Your Realtor informed you that there was an HOA associated with your property.
2. The HOA, for what ever reason, did not or could not contact you earlier.
3. You never requested HOA documentation or points of contact from your Realtor, the closing company or the previous owner even though you were made aware of the HOA by the Realtor.
4. You did purchase the property knowing all of the above.
5. The first written contact by the HOA to you could have been done better.

From an outsiders point of view, it appears that many people dropped the ball. In reviewing GA law, I did not see any type of requirement for the owner and/or Association to provide you with a disclosure package containing the governing documents or other information (there may be one but I never saw it). Based on this information, it seems to be just a failure in communication from everyone that was involved in the sale and purchase of your property.

If you were never informed that the property was governed by an Association - I believe that you would have the possible action against your Realtor for damages. However, per your own posting on this public forum, you stated that you were informed that an Association existed - so I believe you have no one to claim damages from.

All of that being acknowledged, I would like to bring the discussion back to your original question:

"Am I responsible to pay back dues even though it's the closing company's fault for not collecting them and I never agreed to pay anything since I have never signed anything acknowledging the HOA or it's covenants?"

The answer, based on my layman's opinion, would be Yes. You are legally responsible for paying any assessments that occur from the date you purchase your property until you close on selling your property.

Because you purchased a property knowing that it was subject to the governance of the HOA, you entered into a contract with the Association. The fact that you were unaware of all the terms associated with the contract does not release you from abiding from those terms.

I would associate this to driving into another State that has a cell phone use law that you did not know about, and was stopped by the police for using your cell phone while driving. You can certainly ask for tenancy from the authorities because of your lack of knowledge. However, they do not have to grant you that tenancy.

This is the situation you are now in with your Association. You could certainly ask that any late fees, interest and penalties be forgiven because of the errors (If I was on the Board, I would agree to that). However the Board typically does not have the authority to forgive the actual assessments.

My recommendation to you would be to pay the assessments you owe in a timely manner. If there is financial hardship involved, request from the Board to set up a payment plan for the past due assessments. This way you would be fulfilling your contractual agreement with the Association.

If you believe you were wronged by either your Realtor, the Title Company or the Closing Company, then by all means, consult with a local attorney knowledgeable in property law for options on possible remedies.

As I stated earlier, I am not an attorney and I do not work within the legal profession. I am offering advise based on the information in your postings, personal experiences, research and (hopefully) some common sense.

I hope this helps.

Tim

Just because you dont sign up to pay for real estate taxes, doesnt mean the town wont take your house away if you dont pay them. Same goes for HOA.

No need to sign up, you owe.

Hello, John. Greetings from Colorado.

HOA covenants are understood to "run with the land," whether or not it is so stated in the covenants. All attorneys and courts will agree that the purchaser buys the property "as is," and if there are restrictive covenants, they "run with the land" henceforth and forevermore as part of the entire package, whether or not the buyer is aware of that fact when he signs a mountain of papers at closing. If indeed you were not appropriately advised in advance of closing that the property is part of a homeowner association, then your realtor did you a dis-service, and the title company also failed do its job properly. No matter, that is now water over the dam.

What you need to do at this point is contact your HOA executive board and ask them to understand your predicament, and request them to consider allowing you to make some sort of payment arrangement that is manageable for you so that you get caught up with those HOA dues that are in arrears. Most boards that I work with are willing to make special arrangements with owners if there are special circumstances or difficulties to deal with. For your part, if they will allow you to do so, you must make every payment on time and in full--- to demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt that you understand your obligation to the HOA and that you are taking the matter seriously.

And finally, if at some point in time you elect to sell that property, please ask your real estate listing agent to follow the practice of "full disclosure" and make sure that prospective buyers are aware that the property is part of an HOA and that restrictive covenants apply.

This all sounds a little hokey-pokey. Did the association not send you a statement on monthly bill? Why would they wait a year before saying something to you?

I have seen this happen before. The bad news is, you as the new owner are stuck with the assessments. The good news is you can probably sue both the agent who failed to solicit a disclosure package, the bank that had sold the property (due diligence means they had a responsibility to ensure the buyer knew all the facts), as well as the former owner. There is a little, probably non-suable as it can be corrected, mistake on the part of the HOA in that they haven't yet mailed you the packet (if I was the HOA President I would mail you a package today, and waive the bill to you as the buyer as it is the seller who normally pays and mail the bill instead to the bank that sold the property).

This is getting sillier and sillier. Some of you are ready to sue everyone and his uncle and the OP doesn't even know who dropped the ball. There's been a pack of assumptions but no real proof of who didn't do their job. Talk about frivilous lawsuits!

Jon, are you on my HOA board, because you sound just like them.

I hope you never have a financial crisis in your life where you lose your job and have a 80% drop in income. All you see is "pay your fair share" and you aren't even listening to the OP.

He didn't know there was a balance due and no one informed of it for months. Now that he knows, he's trying to resolve the issue.

John (OP) have you spoken with anyone on the board about a payoff? There might be fines/ late charges/ lawyer fees from the previous owner they would be willing to forgive, especially since it appears your title company and/or real estate agent didn't get all the facts for you.

As I mentioned in a post three months ago, several people in our HOA have complained about something like this. One was a foreclosure, and in other cases the Realtors misrepresented or omitted the HOA info until closing.

In the latter case, the general response of the buyer was along the lines of the husband telling the realtor, "No way can you pull this on us -- we are walking away from this, and give us back our earnest money and costs" and the wife telling the husband, "I want this house! We have put too much effort into getting this far, so we are going through with the purchase."

These purchases all happened years ago. My understanding of these situations is that the HOA has no responsibility for the failure to disclose, the dues are clearly owed by the new/current homeowner to the HOA, the seller and/or buyer's realtor are at fault, it's between them and the buyer, and it's not worthwhile for anyone to sue anyone so everyone just lives with it. However, these homeowners generally resent the HOA, although most pay dues.

(Our policy for any homeowners who do not pay dues is to simply place liens (after sufficient time and notice) and just wait until the homeowner wants to sell or refinance. Sometimes we get windfalls; sometimes there is a foreclosure, and we lose the back dues; sometimes a buyer fails to do a title search, and the debt passes to them; but mostly we just wait. We never sue or foreclose for dues. 98% of homeowners pay their dues.)

Anyway, I want to start a practice of giving sellers (any HOA homeowner with a fore-sale sign in front of their home) a stack of one-page info sheets about the HOA, including our web site URL and a polite request at bottom to present this to serious potential buyers, (at latest) upon receipt of offer or earnest money.

I think this would not incur any liability for the HOA. I checked with a lawyer, and he said there is no liability, because it's only informational -- it neither offers nor demands anything. We could not (or would not seek) to enforce sellers actually giving the info flyer to their prospective buyers, and as such it would not interfere with their real-estate transactions. However, this practice would tend to encourage meaningful disclosure, and it would also show goodwill on the part of the HOA by doing what we can to help our neighbors with a problem for which we are not required to do anything.

Whether or not we actually start this practices, several of the "resentful" homeowners warmed up to the HOA just hearing that I had listened to their problem and thought about ways we could try to avoid future recurrence.

We are a mandatory HOA in TX with about 300 single-family residences, only grassy common areas as assets, and a volunteer Board and Architectural Control Committee, dues under $400/year, no management company.

Tim, I believe TX has similar disclosure laws.

Consider the following situation in light of your VA laws: Buyer from CA tells realtor they don't want an HOA, because of experience with intrusive authority and overbearing control. Realtor tells buyer this HOA only makes sure the common area grass is mowed and watered. On the day before closing, realtor provides buyer with HOA covenants. These documents reveal HOA has architectural control over all landscaping, painting and anything else the homeowner may do, as well as authority to enter the home to investigate anything about the home. Buyer has invested much time and effort in choosing this home based on lies, and wife now wants this house. Buyer chooses to go through with the purchase, but hates living under the HOA's authority. Has the realtor actually done anything illegal? Does the buyer really have any options without onerous cost -- tangible or otherwise?

Tim, nice points, but not sure how they pertain to mine, other than the buyer had access to all this information years ago when they purchased, which may or may not be true. (I don't know when my HOA first put up its web site or what else is out there, and that's not really what I wrote about.)

What do you think of my proposal? Do you disagree with anything I posted? Do you see anything about which I should start a crusade with my state legislature (other than making realtors show buyers minutes that may or may not be available)?

I think part of our difficulty is we don't know which state the sale in the original post occurred in. Since each state has different laws, we see a variety of responses.

Jon from NY, from your '..,send them what?' response I guess things are different in NY. A disclosure packet is a thick assemblage of papers (including the current state of the properties assessments) pertaining to the property and the HOA which VA law requires every HOA in VA to provide the seller of a property as soon as the seller notifies the HOA of a pending sale. The law allows a fee to be charged for this providing. The fee must be paid by the seller. The selling agent is then required to provide this to the buyer and/or their agent. The seller may direct the HOA to provide it directly to the buyer. Clearly in the original post no such information reached the buyer. In VA even if the seller is a bank selling a foreclosed property they are still required to provide the disclosure packet. A buyer may refuse the sale if there is something in the disclosure package they don't like, even if they have already gone to contract (I have on several occasions seen buyers use that loophole when a bigger or better property is found outside the HOA, even though they were under contract). There are procedures and penalties for non-compliance. At the same time VA law provides for situations in which the sale moves forward when the disclosure package isn't received.

I have seen two different scenarios leading up to the original posters situation. In scenario 1, the seller is a worthless individual with a very large assessment past due and the same mentality that leads them to conceal merchandise from the cashier when leaving a store, leads them to lie to the buyer and tell them that they contacted the HOA and no disclosure packet was received and nothing is owed on the assessments. Wow, were those new buyer's surprised. In that instance they did indeed file a lawsuit against the seller and a complaint to the DPOR against the seller's agent. The other scenario (the laws in VA have changed since this occurred and I haven't seen it happen since the 90s) the broker handling the sale had signed with both the buyer and the seller as their agent and simply saw no reason to mess up the sale by mentioning the HOA. Numerous complaints by several parties to DPOR (the VA agency that licenses and regulates both HOAs and Realty professionals) eventually brought that local Realtor more in line with established best practices and then laws changed and they simply don't do that here anymore. A third scenario beyond crooked sellers or incompetent agents can occur when an HOA's Board is manned by ineffective individuals who either ignore a request for a disclosure packet, or don't know what should be in one and instead provide incomplete or not timely information.

Note: I have never seen this happen when the buyer has their own realty lawyer going over everything before the sale is finalized. Nor have I seen it happen when both the buyer and the seller have different agents from two different realty companies.

Michael,

I'm not really sure what proposal you are talking about.

In my last post, I showed how the buyer failed to exercise his ability to verify what info he was told about the HOA or discharge the Realtor for not accepting his original instructions of not looking at properties in an HOA. Therefore, you could say that I disagree that it's someone elses fault the buyer is living in misery because they chose to purchase property in an HOA.

As for the crusade, I would suggest that you compare various disclosure laws from around the country, pull the best from all of them and propose it to your legislator.

To get you started, here is a link to VA disclosure laws:

VA § 55-509.4. Contract disclosure statement; right of cancellation

VA § 55-509.5. Contents of association disclosure packet; delivery of packet

As for the original poster - I believe that John has left the forum!

Tim

Michael,

I'm sorry. I missed that completely. I think that your idea of providing a welcome package/info sheet to prospective buyers is a great idea. I also believe that the Realtor would be supportive of it as well. I say go with it.

Tim

Hi Jennifer!

"A homeowners first notice from their HOA shouldn't be a bill. "

I sure can relate to that! I remember when I moved into a HOA in a very restrictive but beautifully maintained and gated community. After about three weeks, I received an envelope from the HOA and immediately thought... "Gee, a welcome letter..how nice"

I opened the letter which read "This letter is being sent to inform you that you are in violation of the association documents. During a review of the community, it was noticed that there is bird doodoo on the top of your mailbox. Please remedy etc etc etc."

I ran outside, cleaner in hand, and since it had rained a few days before...there was no doodoo on my curbside mailbox!!!! Needless to say, I never forgot my introduction to that neighborhood!!!

Ann

I just thought I would throw in a comment here. In our HOA in Utah we had something similar occur. The owner abandoned his condo. It went into foreclosure and the HOA was notified that it was bank owned and was beng sold by such and such realty. The condo was empty for quite awhile and then someone just ubruptly moved in. I noticed they had and asked our management company to go to the door. The occupant would not answer the door. We sent a letter to the residence since we didn't have an owners name, no response. Our management company went to the county recorders office and found out who the new owner was and they were sent a bill. The new owners own a company and they have let one of their employees move in...no lease...another problem. The new owners gave alot of the same arguements as the originator of this discussion. Just as someone previously stated...as part of due diligence on the part of a buyer or new owner they should have checked out what they were getting into. We have a management company who posts their information on the door of our clubhouse. We have a website that has our documents accessible to everyone on it. It is amazing to me how few realty companies utilize those tools and try to actually be informed about the property they are selling so they can pass that info along to a buyer. To date the HOA has not received anything from a bank, title co etc regarding who the new owner is. The HOA and managemnt company had to play detective and find out. The fact that a bill was never received doesn't fly either...I lived in my condo for 4 yrs before anything like a bill was sent out...we were just expected to pay and find out how to do that. As far as providing sets of documents...the previous owner should have passed those on. If I purchased a condo and I was not given a set then I would ask why and then where I would have to go to get one. That is part of due diligence on the part of a buyer. Just my two cents worth.

Oh... for Pete's sake, JonD... LIGHTEN up!!!
I never said anything rubbed me the wrong way... You are reading things into people's words.
I told the story because I found it humerous.... Sorry if you didn't see it that way. Perhaps I should have refrained from sharing my doodoo story at all.

Please tell me you are jesting with this stupid post to me!