Delinquent Assessments

In our HOA in South Carolina, several lots are owned by one or more construction companies that are not the developer of the communty. The covenants and by-laws contain no special provisions that the assessments to be paid by these construction companies are any different than for every other association member (defined as lot owner). (The covenants do have special provisions for the Declarant, i.e. the developer. At least one such builder is delinquent on assessments. Can (or for that matter should) the board of directors negotiate a lower assessment than all other members pay for this builder?

Someone still owns that lot ultimately. Which is probably a LLC - Limited Liability Corporation. Which is very hard to collect against. They still owe the assessments. However, due to the way a LLC is set up, they usually have more than one member in the corporation. This means that if you are to lien, one of those members could just end their LLC partnership until there is no one holding the bag. However, they can be liened once the time or money limit where you allow liens to come into play.

We had a 6 month policy if you were behind in dues to pay or lien. This way ALL members knew if they went 6 months without paying they were subject to a lien or needed to set up a payment plan with us. I would strongly recommend a system like this to establish when someone actually owes and when they can catch up. They may be waiting until they sell the property to catch up on paying back dues. All perfectly legal if you don't have any terms set up. This can simply be done by a vote of the board and put into meeting notes, a memo for all the members, or in the by-laws. It takes much more effort to put them in your CC&R's so I'd wait until you had a bunch of changes to do that.

A owner is an owner. Check with your local tax assessor's office to see who pays the taxes on the property. You will have to have a lot number to ID it. Just be aware their information may be up to 6 months old. You can also check in the legal section of the newspaper to see if there are any existing liens or foreclosures for this group. It's a good idea to do that regularly to keep an eye on who is actually in foreclosure as this is public information. I used it often to know the condition of any abandon non paying property.