There are some scattered court cases which may have an interesting impact on Homeowners Associations, an impact many of us would love to see. From the National Law Review, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that HOAs are debt collectors. We all know they file liens and harrass homeowners into paying dues, fines, collection costs, attorneys’ fees. But if they’re debt collectors then they have to follow all the laws governing debt collections. With what we know about HOA bullies that could subject associations to huge fines.
The Supreme Court’s recent disparate impact decision has been discussed before on Neighbors At War. It will most likely lead to a huge increase in lawsuits because people were discriminated against even if there was no intent to discriminate. Well, housing discrimination is basically the middle name of many HOA board bullies. This creates tremendous financial liability for all HOA communities.
Then there’s the Nevada high court ruling that HOA liens have super-priority status over mortgage companies. Nearly two dozen states have such rules. Lenders might become extremely wary of lending money to potential buyers of HOA property. Once that trend starts, HOA home values will crash because buyers won’t be able to find lenders.
Poor George Clooney. The American actor can’t seem to catch a break from his new British neighbors.
Clooney and his wife bought a 16 million dollar property in rural England…a chance to get away from the celebrity stalkers and paparazzi. But his new neighbors are outraged at his presence. More accurately, they’re outraged because he put up an extensive video security system which they say invades their privacy.
Having a video security system of my own I would bet the vast majority of Clooney’s cameras are fakes. Nobody who has security cameras has the time to watch them, even if they are real.
An old joke by deadpan standup comedian Steven Wright ponders an amusing twist in the English language. He asks “Why we drive on a parkway, but we park on a driveway?”
Well, a Homeowners Association in Frisco, Texas may have solved half that riddle. Homeowners can no longer park on their own driveways in the Stonebriar Village HOA. All cars must be concealed in garages because they make a neighborhood look so ugly.
There are other things that make a neighborhood much uglier. Fascism. Bullying. Property values that never rise because Americans are waking up and paying attention to warnings about life in an HOA.
It’s another sad day for Nevada homeowners. Federal Judge James Mahan has given another one of the Las Vegas HOA swindlers a sissy sentence. Organized crime swindler Charles McChesney was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Ultimately, he’ll only spend 15 months there.
Homeowners in Nevada lost untold millions of dollars when this crime ring ripped off Homeowners Associations all across the valley. They’ll never get a dime of that back. This was a vicious financial crime that completely changed the lives of many decent working and/or retired people. To give these swindlers only 30 months is a crime in itself. Even though only a dozen Homeowners Associations were named as victims in the case, inside information says there may have been hundreds more.
The FBI generated about four million pages of evidence and testimony. Had the investigation exposed the entire Nevada scam the evidence could have run into the hundreds of millions of pages.
Think of this: If crooked HOAs and management companies across the country were put through the same kind of investigative scrutiny there would be millions of convictions. There just aren’t enough prisons to hold everyone.
Yes, it’s a sad day for Nevada. But it’s even sadder for the rest of the country.
I guess we learn things all the time and this one is interesting. It’s a paper published in the University of Cincinnati Law Review about the 2008-2009 mortgage meltdown. Lending institutions are way behind on dealing with all the foreclosed properties. They’ve hired property management companies to help deal with the overload.
Now there’s been a rash of lawsuits by homeowners late on their payments who’ve come back to find that their homes have been trashed and their personal property stolen. Seems it’s being done by these third-party contractors hired by the mortgage companies.
I wonder if there’s any spillover by management companies that foreclose on liens on people in Homeowners Associations?
