Anonymous wrote:The pp is spot on. Its pretty much a thankless job. Everyone wants things to go well, and for everyone else to follow the rules. When you get that one PITA resident, it can drive up costs (frivolous law suits), and be difficult toward residents and board members, and making the volunteer officers miserable.

I'm the PP talking about the one a-hole...this a-hole wanted to sue us because we painted trim on our townhouse a slightly different shade than the approved ones...we received approval from the Board before work was done. He wanted to sue us and the Board. Plus he was paying HOA dues, some of which went toward...legal fees. So he would have been paying for both sides of a lawsuit. Ridiculous.

I am president of my 30 unit Condo Association. Was a boat load of work for the first 5-7 years.

At one point was spending 25-30 hours week on it for a few months. But building had a massive flood that caused arrears and insurance claim issues and workers rebuilding issues and hard to abandon it midstream. My unit was undamaged and it was my only rental property so I just had more time than others and less stress as not my primary home and no damage.

But man we lost our CO, building had heat or hot water, 1/3 of building stopped paying monthly common charges and we got short changed $120,000 by insurance.

And our managing company quit day after disaster as did not want to bother with the extra work to fix building.

So stuff like that can happen. Today I dont have the time to do anything like that. Still in charge but it is on autopilot.

But I did get insurance to pay the money, get a good lawyer to collect all arrears, got a good lawer to grieve property taxes and rebuilt building to better than before all without an assessment or raising common charges or touching reserve fund. We actualy got work done in end for around $40K less than insurance payout. And put it in reserves.

Funny part is people forgot quickly building had a massive flood in 3-4 years and since we were renovated, healthy reserves and low common charges prices took off. Well till next flood

It depends on what your HOA does. But yeah it can absolutely become a nightmare.

I'm on the HOA board at our home, and DH is on the HOA board at our weekend place in the Shenandoah. Both HOAs only job per the bylaws is maintaining the roads. My board is relatively drama free -- the worst thing is dealing with people who don't pay their dues and rage when we have to raise them or do a special assessment. DH has been dealing for years with the fallout of a former board treasurer stealing thousands and thousands of dollars. It took a huge amount of work to get the guy prosecuted and to get him to pay some of the money back.

Someone mentioned banning Airbnbs -- I wish the HOA at our weekend place could do that, but we can't. Our bylaws only allow for maintaining the roads. Most of the folks in our community do not understand this, and will rage about the airbnbs and blame the board for not "banning them" or "dealing with them." We can't.

YMMV