Why buy a condo or townhouse when a colorful little village awaits us sans taxes, upkeep, the basic boring beige and the biggest reason of all NO HOA or their ridiculous dues and psycho boards?!
What a smart investor Mr. Blankenship seems to be. He builds these darling small houses on concrete slabs and has the exteriors finished in three weeks. He paints the exteriors beautiful warm colors of pink, green, purple, robin egg blue, and a steel blue. He changed the roof lines so they don’t look like all of our “cookie-cutter” HOA neighborhoods.
Three weeks is all it took for him to rent every one of them on one year leases at $500 per month. And utilities are running around $50 per month.
This concept could be duplicated anywhere. And everybody wins. No apartment. No condo. No Co-op. No HOA.
For the money I’ve lost on my townhouse I could have built this whole village. Geez, if only I could turn back time!
Our frigid weather and snow here in Colorado reminded me of a video story I did several years ago on a beloved dog. Her name was Glory. And her name was a perfect description of a dog sent to me from Heaven.
Dear Friends: I really don’t won’t to lose any of my regular readers. But it would be irresponsible of me to find a great HOA website and not let you know about it. This is a good one for you to mark and check in with regularly:
“At any given time there’s always a certain percentage of Americans looking to buy a house, and if you’re one of them we warn you: if you want a single-family home (as opposed to a condominium or townhouse where you and your neighbors share ownership of walls, roofs and other structures) avoid any real-estate purchase that requires you to join a homeowners’ association, or HOA.” ~Jennifer Abel
I’ll add one sentence. Do not buy a townhouse or condo or Co-op either!
The latest neighborhood nastiness comes to us from Newport News, Virginia and the Kiln Creek Homeowners Association. Eight years ago Bill and Janeth Garlette built a koi pond in their backyard. And for eight long years the HOA has approved of their pond and their various gardening improvements.
All of a sudden, a new HOA board has hit the couple with two dozen alleged violations of neighborhood covenants. The couple’s attempts at fighting the allegations were futile, so Garlette ripped out the koi pond and razed the backyard to bring it into compliance. But even that wasn’t good enough, and the HOA has filed a 300,000 dollar lawsuit.
Yes, there are allegations of death threats back and forth between the Garlettes and a neighbor who they think instigated the HOA lawsuit. And yes, the Garlettes say they are now officially out of money.
HOAs claim they were set up to protect property values. But this is one neighborhood where property is going to be very difficult to sell.
