guest blog by Nila Ridings
No surprises here. HOAs and condo associations are nothing more than a thieves’ paradise. A simple internet search or glancing through neighborsatwar.dot com will reveal the massive numbers of thefts by HOA board members and HOA managers. The penalty…maybe a few days of community service and a little “talking to” by the judge and they are punishment free.
Here’s one in Still Meadows Condominium Association in Severn where Wanda Brooks could hardly shuffle into the courtroom with her walker but she was able to dine out, get her hair done, pay utilities, and buy gas on the HOA credit card.
Makes me wonder how many Mercedes have been purchased? How many kids have gone to college? (on a fully-paid HOA “scholarships”) How many luxury vacations have been taken? How much real estate has been purchased? How many bottles of booze have been consumed? How much jewelry has been bought? How many kids have had orthodontics? And how many boxes of diapers, dog food, and cigarettes have HOA dues paid for? Far more than we know about, I’m sure of that. Hundreds of millions of dollars per year are being stolen from homeowners and they don’t even know it.
The massive corruption in HOAs is beyond words. Yet, we have 1 in 5 Americans living inside of these hellholes under the belief their property values are protected by signing up for the HOA. What a joke!
Isn’t it interesting how people get so upset when somebody robs them of their wallet in a parking lot and it has $20 in it, but think nothing of all the years of being robbed blind by their volunteer HOA board member neighbors and paid property managers?
The more HOAs that are built in America should reduce the number of bank robberies, I would think. One comes with time in the federal penitentiary, the other with best wishes kisses from the judge.
(read it and weep, another embezzlement case)
I can believe this. When I moved in I found out (after I’d bought of course) that the board has made a “bad investment” whatever that was and lost over $50,000. Also, I noticed this year $45,000 dollars spent on legal fees instead of the usual $5000 with zero explanation. Of course, I’m met with dead silence if I ask for details about any of this, yet I am constantly told there is no money to replant all the trees and shrubs lost to storms (our complex looks barren at this point). Further, they raised our monthly fees by $15 dollars last year to pay to replace rotting wood. I’ve seen zero replacing of wood anywhere, and I’ve complained of rotting wood on my balcony multiple times and have been told it will be replaced. Never buy in a HOA.
Angela B,
I would suggest printing the stories of the balconies that have fallen from apartments and rental homes in the past 30 days. Perhaps the HOA will become more motivated once they see how rotting balconies can become death traps and/or severely injure people?
If the board will not provide you with an explanation or an audit on where that money has disappeared to and why, I would file a suspicion of embezzlement report with you local police department. That is what the district attorney advised me to do when I was unable to get answers as to where $10 Million dollars went in my HOA. I will tell you all of the board members claimed no knowledge of anything and pointed their fingers at the president of the HOA who suddenly died once I hired an attorney to get a court order for the HOA to turn over the records to me. The judge did order the records turned over but the dead man’s successor declared under oath the HOA had no records. She was caught in the act of shredding records about a year later. When I contacted the detective from the police department and advised that records had been found he told me that was a lie because they had let him in those records shortly after the judge ordered them turned over to me.
Keep in mind, people who have nothing to hide, hide nothing. But HOAs are full of liars and thieves.