Florida Rental Application Fees

You are suggesting a board-made rule or even membership-voted-on amendment adding on fees for units with renters based on an assumption that these units cause more day-to-day wear and tear on the common areas and require more daily enforcement work for the management company, correct? I do not like the chances of such a rule or amendment passing legal muster. For one, note that this would be a unique assessment imposed on only certain owners. The covenants that discuss assessments would need some serious re-writing and require a membership vote. Most likely a super majority of all owners would have to vote for this. What percentage of the units are rentals? If the percentage is over 25%, the chances of this passing are probably slim. You just could not get the votes from the landlords to pass the amendment.

I advise just being very strict in enforcement and increasing the penalty (exponentially?) for offenses that are the same and repeat. Be pit bulls. This is your property. Don't put up with abusive and destructive behavior from anyone.

Max, I agree if the HOA can get the supermajority of votes, this is the first hurdle. Otherwise I'd have to see the particular rental restrictions and fee additions to say anything useful.

You don't need a supermajority of votes, you just need to lie that you got at least 50%.

I would additionally seek to understand fully what the MC is doing to warrant collecting a fee for this part of the process. It may very well be deserved, but could also just as easily not be deserved.

Granted there is (or should be) work involved in receiving, organizing, filing/database-ing, and verifying appropriateness/completeness of a rental application. However if some or all of that work is passed to the HOA Board instead, then I'd question why the MC receives any/most/all of that money and it isn't instead income for the HOA.

Of course also important is the contract with the MC and what that indicates as far as fees for services and what services are performed. But I've found that this is sometimes another one of those sneaky income stream for MCs (like resell package preparation, and violation letters/fining) where they can potentially do minimal work, pass responsibility to unpaid volunteers, and reap hefty profit.

That said, I'd more support an appropriate fee to the MC if they were doing the all of the work in regard to rental applications and verification, and the Board was mostly out of the process. Board would merely just have to review and approve/deny applications based on whatever criteria exists and aside from that is hands-off.

Haha. Max is/was one of those MCs reaping profits from some or all of these processes.

But to Max's credit ... state laws allow for MCs to collect some of these fees. MC contracts further allow and define these fees/services. And likely Max and many others are working within all those parameters and are entitled to and deserve the money from those fees. BUT there are other MCs who take things to ridiculous degrees, bastardize processes, and greedily line their pockets at the expense (literally and figuratively) of their HOA clients.

That said, I probably should have left those other examples out, but for the sake of brevity, I didn't elaborate on my thoughts regarding those other processes. But nuances are fully debated and elaborated on within other threads.

You'll have to check your documents to see if this is allowed, but I suspect you'll probably need to amend them in order to do this. Amending documents mean a certain percentage of the homeowners must sign off on this, and if you already have a ton of rentals, this proposal will likely fail.

Ironically, one of our former board members also rented his unit before selling it, and at the time we were trying to get a rental cap approved for our CCRs (you can imagine how that went), he suggested owner-landlords pay a move-in/move-out fee every time they rented the unit. This would help offset some of the additional expenses renters bought to the association, like additional noise and trash. That didn't go over either, but this type of fee might be more acceptable because owner-landlords can always pass that expense onto the renters.
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Until then, having lots of renters doesn't necessarily translate into more trouble, so you'll have to focus on going after the owners for community rule violations. The key is being consistent and fair in applying rule enforcement to everyone so you can avoid the selective enforcement thing, along with proving Mrs. Z's renter and his friends did, in fact, toss the pool furniture into the swimming pool two nights ago.

Security cameras and pool passes everyone would have to use could also work - if you have a system where you swipe in and out, that could help identify possible suspects. If things get really rowdy, hire pool monitors - before we got rid of our pool, we used off duty police officers who also had the authority to shut the thing down and send everyone home, if necessary. On one occasion, the board decided to leave it closed for almost two weeks and letters were sent to all homeowners explaining why - and that if the craziness continued, we'd shut it down for the rest of the summer. It was gangster, but it was effective.

You are a saint! in NC it costs about $5 to file a lien.
Let me get this straight? you dont' charge the HOA the $5! You only charge them $400 if and when they collect? Again you are a saint! God bless you!

I don't live in NC, nor would I ever want to want to!

Sorry, in California, the minimum price to record a lien is $113.00, that is the cost, plus a CA SB2 fee of $75.00.

I know your reading skills are somewhat diminished or limited, BUT I stated the HOA is only charged ONCE the owners have paid, therefore, there is NO cost to the HOA!

the numbers are of little importance. bottom line is you only help out the HOA if it helps your bottom line.
Not sure how implying that boards can just lie about getting votes helps your bottom line, but that's another discussion in an of itself.