If you fail to keep up your homeowners’ association fees or complete the annual assessments, the HOA could end up foreclosing. Its par for the course these days that when you purchase a home, condo or town house, that happens to be a communal development, then you will most likely have to pay fees to a housing association.
Now what would happen if you simply ignored these fees or failed to meet the annual assessments? The Housing Association would apply to get a lien on your home and this then leads into foreclosure (assuming you still fail to settle up with your housing association).
The Homeowners’ Associations are a body that sets up to look after the communal garden areas, essential repairs in stairwells, cleaning, lighting for communal hallways and exterior electricity bills. All this maintenance costs and it recovers its cost from the lease holder. Failure to pay up means a service is being provided to you and you are essentially not paying for it.
Other work that the housing association must carry out includes removing snow, landscape gardening, fitting new communal windows and repairing roof tiling. Some of the more-modern condo complexes have swimming pools, gyms, clubhouses and tennis courts which can be used by the residents. All of these amenities need regular maintenance and cleaning, so the fees required by the association are likely to be higher in these luxury blocks.
The housing association also has to enforce the rules within the community; if one resident happens to be playing music loud late at night and making life a misery for all the other members of the community, the association must act and the administration work to remedy anti-social behaviour can mount up in both time and money.
HOA fees can often spring a surprise one-off fee for those complexes that need work carried out on a one-off basis. An example of this would be that a condo complex may need new exterior windows and fascia repairs following a wild storm or even hurricane; these “special assessment fees” are an unfortunate but necessary payment that will land in the lap of the resident – but not as a regular payment but as a one-off fee and comes in addition to regular payments being made.
Before taking out a homeowner association property you should read the terms and conditions on payment of fees should you default at any time, as some associations may charge interest on late payment as well as collection cost fees (if an agency was involved in the fee recovery).
Source: www.pamsvas.com
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