Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I hope Minier is not as ignorant as this poster who does in fact have a perpetual lien on their property for collection of assessments if they live in Steiner Ranch. You will find that many of the posters are real estate professionals who might be quick to divert attention away from or casually dismiss the HOA issue. It's easy to "see" the house. It is much more difficult to visualize the impact that the HOA will have on your life and your property.
Also contrary to the quoted poster's comments, HOAs and management companies have virtually no regulation at all. It doesn't help that we have a state senator that has the largest empire of HOA management companies in the nation and you can bet that he and the rest of the organizations profiting from this work hard to protect these business practices to the detriment of Texas homeowners.
For example, were you aware that you can be denied the right to vote in your HOA or that such denial is a common tactic used by boards anxious to preserve their power base? In many neighborhoods that are still run by developers, you may never get the right to vote.
There are no open records or open meetings requirements for HOAs in this state (with the exception of the Woodlands and Clear Lake). Wanting to know why your mandatory assessments are increasing? Want to be able to verify the representations made by your board members and management company? Good luck.
Real estate professionals will tell you to get involved if you don't like it - except that in declarant-controlled communities you don't have a choice and in other communities you can easily be disenfranchised from voting by the existing board. In short, a board can easily maintain a power base for a very long time by effectively disenfranchising members through a variety of means including tossing votes, disallowing votes, declaring members to be ineligible to run, ignoring votes, proxy voting, etc.
Look at a subdivision like Westcave Estates. A nice subdivision until one of these professional management companies comes along. Suddenly, residents are subjected to threats of fines in a subdivision with restrictive covenants that did not provide for fining powers. Now the residents are constantly accused of being in "violation" by a management company that profits from the fining process. Did the residents have any say in this matter at all? No.
Due to the lack of open records and the involuntary membership (i.e., funding) obligation, many residents have no idea where their funds are going. This is guaranteed to generate disputes. Boards and management companies often provoke disputes by deliberately withholding the information to cover up their financial dealings with your mandatory assessments.
You will find yourself being forced to pay "architectural committee" fees that can be set at arbitrary amounts to be able to build anything on your property. Do you really want to be asking someone for permission to put up a swingset, a treehouse, or a birdhouse on your property? Perhaps the biggest problem with the HOAs is the power of an unaccountable board to be able to inflict tremendous economic harm on you and your investment.
These HOAs can foreclose on your home due to this perpetual lien. Many HOA Boards approve "resolutions" that allow them to create other "fees" and then recharacterize your assessment payments to be applied to these other fees - thus leaving you in the hole on your assessments and therefore subject to foreclosure. The power to foreclose for assessments thus becomes the mechanism to extort all sorts of things from homeowners once assessments are entangled with other fees at the discretion of the board or management company.
I'll give just one example of the forced vendor situation. Propane is for the most part economically unregulated. Sounds great as long as you have a choice of source. What these places do is 1) remove your choice, and 2) mandate consumption. Deregulation is good as long as the consumer has choices. The HOAs in these places have become tools for vendors to ensure unregulated monopolies. You might find restrictive covenants in several subdivisions that require you to install gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, range hookups, etc. If you buy in one of the every 5th home is the same master planned communities, you may not even realize that some of these appliances were required because the submittal/approval process is hidden from view or totally under the control of the developer. Your choice about whether or not to use gas has just been eliminated so you can't "opt out" of this scheme. Now there will be clauses here and there within the restrictive covenants that effectively require you to purchase gas from a central propane system. These clauses could range from outright mandating that you purchase the gas from a designated vendor to requiring to you get Architectural Committee approval for an alternative. If there are monies being paid by the propane vendor to the developer, the HOA, etc. you can rest assured that will not get approval. You can guess where this goes since the price is unilaterally set by the owner of the propane gas system.
Finally these types of situations guarantee litigation which will eat up reserve accounts and result in increased assessments. Your home is the security for collection of these assessments. You should also be aware that your home is effectively the security for any loan that the HOA would take out. These HOA Boards have the power to borrow on behalf of the HOA and your home becomes the ultimate security for such borrowing. Keep in mind that the HOA may not be controlled by the homeowners but rather a developer seeking sources of revenue to build out more phases or complete existing ones. In these economic times you should be particularly concerned about buying into HOA property.
These problems are not isolated instances in HOA-land, they are the standard operating procedure. One final note. Although many will suggest that you "read the CCRs", that really doesn't help much. For one, there is nothing to prevent a board from imposing greater restrictions on your property, from interpreting restrictions as they see fit, or from developing "rules" regarding your property.
Property values are really more related to location and other factors - not an HOA. You will find that HOA proponents want to credit an HOA when the economy is good and then blame the economy rather than the HOA when prices fall. The reality is that HOAs have not been shown to "preserve or increase" property values. HOA creation was driven largely by developers, municipalities, and the federal government which gave buyers easier access to mortgage financing if they purchased homes in HOAs.
Good grief. Get over it. Not every HOA is an evil empire that changes the rules on a weekly basis for no reason and fines its residents for fun and profit. Neither myself nor any of our neighbors have ever had an issue with our HOA. And for just over $50 a month, I think it's a pretty good deal. In fact, I am amazed that they can do so much with such small monthly dues. We have three fantastic pools, 12 playgrounds, 18 miles of hike and bike trails, basketball court, tennis coursts, holiday events (free, BTW), and the grounds always look perfectly manicured. If you don't want to live in an HOA community, then don't. But don't mislead everyone into thinking ALL HOA's are bad.
re living and neighbors. i am much better in a crowd. have done it both ways.
i have a secret place in the mountains use it some. but as you grow older others do a better and better job of leaving you alone.
I would certainly check out Belterra. Belterra is beautiful, lots of trees and great views. As one of the original residents out here, I love it. The neighbors are great too. Most important the schools. Dripping Spings ISD is far better than Bastrop. If you want good schools, DS is the place for you. If you want a great neighborhood, then look no further than Belterra.
I live out on 290W...toward Belterra. We have a lovely home with 3+ acres...tons of oak trees. 320k+. We have a pool, garden and we can walk around our "timbers" on our land. It's private; we've met a few neighbors yet they are far enough away. We can go for a runs, bike rides, etc. The commute is not bad at all and grocery and shopping is 15 mins. away if that. We're still in Travis county(right on the edge) and our schools are ASID. It's really very nice out this way.
Good grief. Get over it. Not every HOA is an evil empire that changes the rules on a weekly basis for no reason and fines its residents for fun and profit. Neither myself nor any of our neighbors have ever had an issue with our HOA. And for just over $50 a month, I think it's a pretty good deal. In fact, I am amazed that they can do so much with such small monthly dues. We have three fantastic pools, 12 playgrounds, 18 miles of hike and bike trails, basketball court, tennis coursts, holiday events (free, BTW), and the grounds always look perfectly manicured. If you don't want to live in an HOA community, then don't. But don't mislead everyone into thinking ALL HOA's are bad.
Very true, but I think there is a lot of mis-information about HOA's in the positive light, and not a whole lot in the negative light. I found the entire post useful, even though I did take it with a grain of salt - we can't paint every HOA w/the same brush, as I'm sure you know. I would personally prefer to avoid the whole HOA debacle, but it seems like that is next to impossible throughout most of the metro TX areas, so it's something I have to live with, and try to find one of the "good" ones.
As you might have guessed, I'm coming from one of the bad ones. Well, not so much bad as completely incompetent! And yes, I for one am quite impressed at how little is paid in comparison to what you get. Granted, I'm coming from the Northeast, where everything is ridiculous. I currently pay over $260/MONTH, and I barely have the teeny patch of grass in my front and back yard mowed. Our first winter here, we foolishly didn't buy any shovels or salt, b/c the CCR said they cover all that stuff for us! After our first snowstorm, a friendly neighbor lent us one, and we bought our own as soon as possible. We were rather young when we purchased, and the board just assumed that our parents had paid our way in, so we were immediately inundated w/the most ridiculous accusations and threatened w/fines. (we were "observed" painting the siding w/a roller - I politely pointed out that the discoloration was more akin to an aerosol spray, like, I dunno, bug spray? And it was there before we moved in and I had the pcitures to prove it!)
Most recently, they have decided to institute ridiculously slow speed limits, and they fine people based on who complains the loudest. The Property Manager even admitted to us that's what happened in our case - we have a neighbor who doesn't belong in a civilized neighborhood. I've since peppered the board with demands for proof of this so-called violation, submitted the case history on this horrid neighbor, including the police report we filed on her, and then submitted the list of repairs that we have either undertaken at our own time & expense, or have repeatedly asked that items be maintained/repaired, but have not been a "priority" for the board, and we've only been asking for 6 years!
Oh, and the kicker? Since no one around here actually cares, the same handful of residents show up every year to the meeting, and we never have enough people on hand to actually vote members to our board, so the people who make these rules up as they go? They are just a bunch of friends who have accomplished nothing much in life, and get their rocks off by feeling important as self-imposed "presidents" of the board - complete w/their own business cards, which I have no doubt comes out of my dues!
Sorry if this was a bit off topic - but I feel that the other side of HOA's need to be exposed, and let people make their own decisions. I, for one, am already eternally grateful to this board warning me about Belterra's propane scam. It's not about a few extra dollars paid on propane, it's about the current mindset of the HOA. I don't need to know anymore, Belterra was crossed off my list just b/c of the HOA!
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
