Tag Archives: HOA

Out Come The Checkbooks In Visalia, California

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guest blog by Nila Ridings

Oh, the tempers have started furiously flying at the sight of the assessment letters arriving in the mail!

The homeowners in the elite HOA of The Lakes in Visalia, in the Central San Joaquin Valley, are fuming because the private roads need paving (according the property manager and the board) and that requires an emergency assessment of $2,300 per lot. If a person owns three lots they need to triple that payment. Why the need for the emergency assessments? Quick answer: The reserves are underfunded. Which comes as no surprise to all of us who work daily on HOA issues.

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Dangerous To Your Personal Finances!

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We’ve seen this kind of thing over and over. You buy an expensive HOA home next to a golf course or a pretty little lake. You pay an extra high premium for such a nice view.

Suddenly, it all goes away. The golf course is sold to a new developer who hatches a plan to add a whole new subdivision on top of the golf course. The pretty little lake, it turns out, is a drainage basin for the county and the county suddenly decides to drain it.

Where’s your investment? Gone, gone, gone. Welcome to HOA living.

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Can Dinosaurs Wreck Property Values?

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Oh, Lordy, I love this job! It never gets old.

Good neighborhoods are quirky. That’s because people are quirky, and their quirks keep us all smiling and make the world go ’round. The problem with Homeowners Associations is that they’re bland, bleached, with a sameness that brings everyone to the same level. Standing out from the crowd is a well-known guaranty of getting yourself sued.

The New Territory Residential Community Association in Sugar Land, Texas is having a conniption fit over some ‘yard art’ in front of one family’s home. Other families have decorative lions in their front yards. But the Hentschel family has put up some beautifully made statuary that’s unique: metal sculptures of a velociraptor and a T-Rex.

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Judge Approves Purple Swing Set!

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guest blog by Nila Ridings

The Stout family is celebrating around the purple swing set tonight! It’s not going away. The parents are not going to jail. The kids can smile and be happy while swinging to their hearts content.

The Raintree Lake board of directors (Missouri) just wasted a lot of money on legal bills and put their HOA on national news. Not to mention the story went viral on the internet. Let’s HOPE they learned something from this case.

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Free Speech in HOAs: protected in NJ, not in FL?

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guest blog by Deborah Goonan

As the 2016 Presidential election campaign heats up, so do political sign controversies in homeowners associations. Here’s a perfect example from Florida, a dispute over a Hillary Clinton sign in a resident’s window.

Help Me Howard, Channel 7 WSVN, on political signs in your HOA(1)

Howard Finkelstein (2) is Public Defender for Broward County in Florida, but he moonlights as a legal analyst for the local Fox News affiliate. According to Finkelstein’s analysis, an HOA can deny a resident’s right to display a political sign as long as their documents are “written correctly,” and if the homeowner took this to court, she would “probably lose.” However, an HOA cannot allow some types of political signs (such as the one we see in the video about gun ownership rights) and not others ( a sign supporting Hillary Clinton).

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