On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:13:33 -0600, Hell Toupee
wrote:

Zootal wrote:

Just out of curiosity - do you have the right to refuse to sign the
agreement if you buy the house? IOW, can you buy a house in one of these HOA
neighborhoods, but refuse to sign or comply?

An HOA is a corporate equivalent of a government, and it controls
the community. Signing the agreement is mandatory when purchasing
into the community.

Abiding by the terms are mandatory. In Maryland at the very least
there is no method of signing an agreement, at least for some HOAs,
but I'll bet all. A well organized HOA might want to make sure that
all prospective buyers knew there were covenants on the land, but the
seller would often want them not to know, depending on whether a buyer
would be happy with such covenants or unhappy to have them.

(My seller was afaict scrupulously honest, and he didn't say a word. I
don't know why not. It might have slippped his mind and I didn't
think to ask. Nor did his real estate agent tell me, but they may
have violated real estate law when I wanted to make an offer but they
said he wouldn't be interested. I should have insisted, because the
law required them to relay good-faith offers.)

And even if a state had an agreement, and somehow a buyer never signed
it, the conditions go with the land and are binding whether he signed
them or not, unless the owner can show that he didsn't know and
needn't have known about the terms. That's hard to show. In other
long post today by me, it turns out in the OP the owner knew about and
agreed to his local n'hhood's terms and had no reason to think there
were additional terms by a higher level HOA that his own local HOA was
a member of. How could he know there were two sets of documents?

For those people who wonder if government would
be better if it were run like a business, look at HOAs before
deciding if that alternative is preferable.

I agree with you here. The problem is in people more than the form of
government. That's why "checks and balances" are so important, why
each part of government being subject to investigation or overruling
by others is important.

A corrupt or badly informed HOA doesn't have much of that, except in
the civil courts, wyhich can be very expensive about cases which are
often "not that important".

Dissolving an HOA usually isn't as simple as voting it out of
existence. The development of the community carried a lot of costs
that were not born by the local governments but were carried up by
the developer, who passed that responsibility onto the HOA. Those
development expenses are usually only partly included in the costs
of the houses. A lot of it is also structured into the HOA fees,
along with the maintenance costs. Even if the HOA were dissolved,
the debts remain, and somebody has to pay them. The local
governments usually don't want to, which is why they encourage HOAs
in the first place.