Homeowner’s Association Death Spiral
When Association members don’t pay their association assessments it can put a financial strain on the remaining homeowners. Sometimes this situation is exacerbated by maintenance companies that use attorneys that charge excessive fees for collection of the fees. It is not uncommon to see fees in excess of $3000 charged by these law firms for conducting foreclosures on the homeowners. In our experience such foreclosures rarely result in any of the fees being paid thereby making the situation worse because now the homeowners association is out both the dues owed plus the attorney fees paid to the attorney. The biggest problem is that the maintenance companies typically only budget enough to go after a few delinquent homeowners. The maintenance company then will typically raise the fees everyone else pays which makes it more expensive and fewer people will pay. So in the end you have half of the association paying their dues and supporting the other half that isn’t.
Our office has worked with maintenance companies and homeowners associations to develop a comprehensive collection policy. Instead of wasting money filing foreclosure lawsuits that rarely result in any fees collected we use a much simpler method that gets much better results. Our goal is to reduce the number of chronically delinquent homeowners. This strategy was developed through years of experience dealing with homeowners associations that had no collection policy to speak of.