And here I thought Canadians were all so polite. Well, in my experience, they’re a heck of a lot more polite than your typical American.
Still, when people get involved in a Homeowners Association, on either side of the border, tempers can flare, guns get pulled, people get injured and are sometimes even shot to death. So far, all the HOA murders have happened on the American side.
Do HOAs ever find true justice when they’re ripped off by property managers? Well, not often. But once in a blue moon a crooked HOA manager is held to account. Well, kind of.
A couple of property managers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire were caught with their hands in several HOA cookie jars under their control. Over a two year period they stole more than a hundred thousand bucks.
“No contest! No contest at all!” Judges love to hear those words. It means they can dispose of a case quickly, make the bad guys promise to pay back a few bucks, and not have to bother about putting the bad guys behind bars.
Gosh, how many times do we have to hear that line from these embezzlers? “Filled with remorse.” It’s such a load of horse puckey. If you’re going to make a bald-faced theft of 350,000 bucks from your neighbors, the only remorse you’re going to feel is that you didn’t steal enough.
Jill Rouse Boothby of Boothby Realty was a property manager for nearly a dozen Birmingham, Alabama condo associations. Plea agreements like hers are only made if she can plead guilty to a small fraction of the crimes she’s accused of. Halloween is over so we can’t really call her a witch. She’s worse. And with all the people she’s hurt, with all the elderly people who’ve been swindled out of their life savings, she deserves worse punishment than she’ll ever be given.
Have you noticed over the past couple of years how more and more news media outlets are doing HOA stories? It’s a trend that will continue growing as HOA boards and management companies become more abusive. In fact, when the HOA bubble bursts in the coming housing collapse, HOA homeowners are going to be screaming about their vanishing home equity. They can’t complain that we didn’t try to warn them.
The NBC affiliate in Atlanta is the latest station to become a little more aggressive. Here’s the link to their story.
Embezzling from Homeowners Associations in America is an epidemic. But when a federal prosecutor accepts a tiny plea bargain agreement from a chronic embezzler it stinks to high heavens.
Birmingham, Alabama… Realty company owner Jill Rouse Boothby admits to stealing more than 375,000 dollars from eleven condo associations she managed. She pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and faithfully promises she’ll pay back the hundreds of thousands of bucks she stole. Apparently, there’s not going to be any jail time.
