RQ (Mississippi)
Posts: 6
Posts: 6
Posted:
Please forgive me if this has been posted before. I did several searches for this topic but did not find what I was looking for (although I found quite a bit of good reading material!)... This forum is great.
Basically we have a 600ish property HOA in Mississippi, which has about 275 owners. Most people own one empty/wooded lot, but of our 120 homes, most sit on 2-3 lots each. We have about 200 lots that are owned by the HOA that are considered "privilege lots" (no utilities or road access) so that people can buy into our HOA and enjoy access to hunting, a large lake, and our community center.
One of the issues that our bookkeeper has struggled with is a lot owner selling their lot and not notifying her of the transaction. She can usually determine when a lot is sold because the monthly HOA dues payments start being paid by someone new. Sometimes she knows because the former owner suddenly stops paying and she calls/mails the old owner asking if everything is okay. Sometimes they answer but most of the time they don't. So far our only sure fire way of knowing is to go to the county clerk's office each spring and get hundreds of pages of printouts and compare them lot by lot with the previous year. At that point, however, most people would already be 6+ months in arrears on their HOA dues are are placed on the foreclosure list.
My question is... how do other HOAs know when properties change hands?
This month we are installing a gate at our community's only entrance and lot owners must contact me to have their names entered into the call box. I think this will catch a few folks, but we will miss buyers whose seller hands them their old clicker/hangtags that grant them automatic access to the gate...
Thank you
Basically we have a 600ish property HOA in Mississippi, which has about 275 owners. Most people own one empty/wooded lot, but of our 120 homes, most sit on 2-3 lots each. We have about 200 lots that are owned by the HOA that are considered "privilege lots" (no utilities or road access) so that people can buy into our HOA and enjoy access to hunting, a large lake, and our community center.
One of the issues that our bookkeeper has struggled with is a lot owner selling their lot and not notifying her of the transaction. She can usually determine when a lot is sold because the monthly HOA dues payments start being paid by someone new. Sometimes she knows because the former owner suddenly stops paying and she calls/mails the old owner asking if everything is okay. Sometimes they answer but most of the time they don't. So far our only sure fire way of knowing is to go to the county clerk's office each spring and get hundreds of pages of printouts and compare them lot by lot with the previous year. At that point, however, most people would already be 6+ months in arrears on their HOA dues are are placed on the foreclosure list.
My question is... how do other HOAs know when properties change hands?
This month we are installing a gate at our community's only entrance and lot owners must contact me to have their names entered into the call box. I think this will catch a few folks, but we will miss buyers whose seller hands them their old clicker/hangtags that grant them automatic access to the gate...
Thank you
