limiting ownership in Associations

This really does not make any sense to do. The HOA can NOT control who buys or rents what if they don't own all of the property. It is a mortgage company decision NOT a HOA. People can buy as many houses they want to buy as long as they are approved by the bank/mortgage company to do so.

A side note to this is that Florida is one of the few states that may have state laws restricting the multiple sales referring to condos. A few years back there were some investors buying multiple properties, fixing them up substandard, and resaling them. I do NOT know all the details related to this situation but the investors were sent to prison for selling the substandard condo's in a short period of time. This is OUTSIDE the HOA and would require more research. It would be the owners of these substandard units to apply the law if this were the case and NOT the HOA.

Back to the HOA...Your HOA should have foreclosed or place a lien on this person. I had to foreclose on someone who did a similar thing in our HOA. They lost their house for only $2K they owed us. Your HOA needs to have an established timeline in place before you place a lien. We had a 6 month non-payment of dues and we would place a lien on the property. After a year or a bit more depending on the situation, we would then pursue the foreclosure process. Which doesn't take that much time but is NOT worth the HOA purchasing the home. It's just a "Stop the bleeding" type measure. It should ONLY be used in very specific situations. A foreclosure does stop as soon as the owner pays what is due.

A lien isn't that expensive and legal costs are part of the filing fees along with interest/late fees. Deliver it by certified mail to the address listed in the HOA and the person's real address outside the HOA if they have one. It's time to be more aggressive by placing lien or deciding on foreclosing on the ones you may have.

Oh and we do realize that the multiple lot owner would automatically be exempt from any new ruling. We are just fearful that he might sell all of his lots to another person who would continue to keep us in the same situation!

It sounds like your HOA has bigger financial issues than this one payer. One person should NOT have that much of an effect on your budget for NOT paying. A HOA should account for atleast 10 - 25% of their membership NOT paying or being late payers depending on the size of their HOA. We had 107 homes and only 90 of them a month were always dependable on paying their monthly dues give or take every month.

I think your HOA is setting it's budget too low overall. Keep in mind your HOA is a NON-PROFIT corporation and it's expenses should match what it spends out split equally amongst ALL the owners. At the end of the year the HOA should maybe have a reserve account and enough to carry the expenses for it's next month for the most part ideally.

If your HOA can't cover one or two non-payers, then really your budget should be looked over. It doesn't make sense to keep it that low. Even stores account for thefts in their budgets but don't limit the number of shoppers they have in the store. Why this guy refuses to pay his fair share until liened is a bit crazy to me as the property being rental the dues are then tax deductible. They are NOT if you use the home a primary residence. So something else seems to be going on here.

Joan,

In answer to your original question, limiting ownership is a good idea and whether it can be done will depend on your state laws.

If the law permits this, you will need to amend the declaration, not the bylaws or other rules. The declaration will lay out how to amend that document and it is seldom done by holding a vote at a meeting. Typically, declarations are amended by getting a specified percentage of owners to sign an amendment and then recording those signatures where the original declaration was recorded.

I think trying to limit ownership is a rocky, pot hole laden, legally expensive, etc. road that it is best not to encourage one to go down.

My thoughts exactly.

Forming an corp can be done for as little as $29 and the corporation can exist in any state, not the state the units are located in. Filing requirements are also very easy and cheap depending on what state your talking about, taxes are easy, with software like quickbooks, and online tools, its much easier than you think.

It wouldn't fix the problem of current owners, as they would be grandfathered.

Another issue would be enforcement. It would be impossible for the HOA to enforce, as it would loose a court case to limit ownership. So the problem is, does the HOA spend limitless money on lawyers to fight people like this, and loose costing thousands? Or just it just make the rule and ignore people who ignore it?