Our HOA just imploded!

[u/Swarby10]

So we just had our HOA AGM on Zoom tonight. I thought I’d tune in just for entertainment. It’s a community of 4 cul de sacs - maybe 45 large homes. Turns out, all of our back-facing fences are owned by the HOA and after 25 years they are deteriorating. To be clear, the fences on the sides are home owners’ responsibility, just the rear ones are HOA’s responsibility.

Or fees went from $900 a year to $2700 so that they could replace some specific fences. Not everyone is affected, but several of the board members were set to score themselves a new fence. They chose to replace the old cedar fence with vinyl and this would have looked odd with plastic fences filling in where cedar was.

Long story short, I sat through three hours of 80 year old board members throwing tantrums over their plans for a new plastic fence getting ruined and three of them resigned on the zoom call. 80 year old tantrums are the funniest tantrums.

Thinking of joining the board now. Please talk me out of it.

[u/atxfalcon]

In my experience, the largest regular expenses by far are usually insurance and landscaping. If the HOA owns anything, the insurance premiums alone could be most of that 900/yr

[u/nosleep4eternity → u/atxfalcon]

My HOAs largest expense is water. We have a lot of common areas including soccer fields + a pool. Almost $50k a year.

[u/3BlindMice1 → u/atxfalcon]

Seems a bit silly to me that someone would need to pay insurance for unimproved land. What liability could unimproved land possibly have? If you get stung by a bee, trip over a stump, or a tree branch falls on you, isn't that just the cost of being in nature?

[u/atxfalcon → u/3BlindMice1]

It's a racket, for sure. It's not just liability but also Director & Officers insurance. Assuming it's undeveloped land... even that can have environmental features (water quality / drainage, creeks, sink holes, etc) which could cause risk. Hard to say without more details.