Associa, CAI and Crooked HOA Transfer Fees
Transfer fees are among the biggest scams in the housing business. North Carolina residents tried to get them outlawed. Colorado is trying. New Mexico is trying. Transfer fees are a ‘little’ item on your paperwork that pops up when you try to sell your home. If you live in a Homeowners Association of any kind you’re likely to learn that you have to pay the fee before you can sell to a buyer. Transfer fee. That means some property manager had to photocopy the HOA covenants, probably a hundred or so pages. But you don’t photocopy them one page at a time. No, they’re on his computer. Push one button and the printer spits them all out in a couple of minutes.
So, what do transfer fees cost? Well they can cost the buyer anywhere from 150 to 4000 bucks. For photocopies! And many a house sale has fallen through because someone in the transaction has to come up with that extra money.
Where does the money go? Simple. It’s a transfer, remember? A transfer directly into the pockets of some board officer or the property manager. That’s why HOA giants like Associa and CAI fight like the dickens when state legislators start getting wise and drafting proposals to reign these crooks in. With those two phony organizations constantly lying about how they “represent homeowners,” it’s blatantly obvious they don’t represent the interests of homeowners. No, they just represent the dollars they can sneak out of a homeowner’s pockets.
(link to Albuquerque article on transfer fees)
