Homeowner’s Associations — you either love them or hate them… and most people lean toward the hate.
Now, North Carolina lawmakers are considering a bill that could shake things up for HOAs across the state.
Rep. Frank Iler, who represents Brunswick County, has heard it all. “There’s 14,000 HOAs [in North Carolina],” he said last summer. “Almost three million people live in them. There are issues, whether they think there are or not.”
For years, Iler has been on the receiving end of HOA horror stories — and he’s been trying to do something about it. He’s backed several reform bills that aimed to make HOAs more transparent and accountable, including one that would’ve created a Community Association Oversight Division within the Department of Justice.
That bill didn’t pass. But it did lead to the formation of a House Select Committee on Homeowners’ Associations, co-chaired by Iler himself. The committee heard from residents frustrated by what they see as unchecked power in the hands of HOA boards — and from industry representatives who insisted current laws are working just fine.
When Iler introduced H.B. 959 last year, based on the committee’s recommendations, it ran into stiff opposition from the Community Association Institute, a national lobbying group representing HOAs and the businesses that serve them. The bill stalled — but Iler isn’t giving up.
“They take credit for slowing it down but it’s not done,” he said. “Next year is coming. They need to be quiet. I’m not going to go too far with my language but they didn’t make us happy. The way they approached it was ridiculous.”
One of the more memorable moments during the reform push? A lobbyist warned the Attorney General might get complaints about… geese.
“Their lobbyists came and brought people in and said: ‘[Community members] are going to be complaining to the [Attorney General] about geese coming out of the pond,’” Iler recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I think this other issue in your neighborhood — a $14-million amenity center without a vote of the people — that may be a little bit of a bigger deal than geese coming out of the pond.’”
The new legislation shares a lot with past proposals: It would require HOAs to be more responsive to residents’ records requests, increase transparency around budgets, and make it harder to foreclose on homeowners over small amounts of unpaid fees.
“There’s some very basic things we had in it,” Iler said. “The limit on what you can foreclose on — you can’t take grandma’s condo for $300. And transparency: requiring you to do a budget to show members, to produce documents in a reasonable time period, which [for] now they’re doing nothing. The president of the HOA can say: ‘You can’t have that.’ It’s just dictatorial things that should be basic. But it’s kind of like a government. Someone gets a little authority and they think they’re king of their fiefdom.”
House Bill 444, the latest effort to rein in HOA overreach, just passed its first reading and is now in the hands of the House Committee on Housing and Development.
Stay tuned.