Townhouses looking bad

We have 120 townhouses in our association. A walk through was conducted last Spring. Some homeowners fixed up their properties. Others did not. We have homes with rotting and peeling trim, broken windows, front doors with peeling paint, etc. The list goes on.

Our manager has sent letters. But that's it. We have a clause in our documents that says the Board can send someone onto the property to make repairs and charge the homeowner 1 1/2 x the amount. It's never been done, as far as I know. The situation is we may not have enough money in our account to cover the costs of the repairs that need to be done, and we risk that the homeowner will not pay or say we trespassed.

What can we do to get people to fix up their properties and correct violations of our architectural covenants? Should we put liens on their homes? Should we go ahead and fix up properties that are the worse?

PauG,
What maintenance responsibilities are listed as the responsibility of the owner and of the HOA? Each party needs to maintain those which are their responsibility. If the HOA's Board is not maintaining their property, it will be difficult for the Board to enforce homeowners' maintenance problems. So if this is the case the Board members needs to shape up or be replaced. After correcting any such problems give all of the owners a blanket warning with a reasonable deadline to repair any problems they have. After that start fining and if necessary repairing so long as you are legally allowed to do this.

You are quite right to be concerned with if the association will recover the money. Apart from the issues of trespass or unauthorized work the owner may simply be unable to pay. If you have a lien and they don't lose their house to foreclosure you eventually get your money back. But you are still out in the meantime.

I would try to contact some of the people and find out why they haven't done the work. They may be unable to afford to. Regardless of your position on the situation the simple fact is that some people are hanging by a thread to their house and others are going to lose their houses. And those people won't be able to sink money into fixing things up.

If money seems to be a major issue, then you might look to help make it more affordable. This doesn't have to cost the association any money. One thing that may be quite doable and take only a little time is go ask a store for a discount if paint for five (or however many will buy) houses agree to buy at the same time (or in a given time frame).

Perhaps you could help arrange for someone with more money but not able to do the work themselves to help pay for materials if someone with more ability and less money helps them out. Or perhaps you might be able to find a community group that will help people out.

I would seriously look into some of those options first. I hope to get that kind of thing going in my neighborhood even without some problem. I plan to see if I can get some discounts for fire ant treatments for instance next spring.

Paug,

I would say the first step is to nofity the city code enforcement to see where that goes. Our old board decided to go legal and it cost our assn $6,000 for repairs and almost $14,00 in legal fees when they could have gone to the city and the owner would have been fined $100 per day until repairs had been done. Now we have a lien on the property and now must pay exta legal fees to foreclose. I'm sure the owner is very pleased to have had her unit repaired at no cost to her but she may regret her not taking care of it herself when she has to cough up this amount with interest running daily. We tried mediation which accomplished nothing. Check out city ordinances and report the owner.