When you buy a home, the last thing you pay attention to is the management of that neighborhood. You see the beautiful marble countertop in the kitchen, the pristine hardwood floors, and the potential for your family to grow and settle into the space, but what you don’t see are the numerous letters sent through the summer complaining about how much your grass is growing or that your dumpster needs to be removed from the street within 24 hours of trash collection. 

Personally, there are few things that I despise more than the HOA in my neighborhood. For those of you lucky to not know, most homes built in subdivisions today have a Homeowners Association that you can’t opt out of. My biggest gripe is that the HOA isn’t run by the actual homeowners, but instead run by an outsourced community management company that’s usually far removed from the neighborhood itself. 

Our HOA is based 20 to 30 miles away from our subdivision so it’s hard to trust they are managing the neighborhood with pure intentions. When your sole job is to find miniscule flaws in homes that don’t belong to you nor do you see on a daily basis, it’s easy to nitpick things that in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter. 

The company always sends us letters complaining about the grass needing to be cut but because they arrive via snail mail, the issue is usually taken care of before the letter even gets delivered. It’s also difficult to witness the HOA company when they ride around taking pictures of people’s homes because they choose to survey the neighborhood on Tuesdays when people are at work. I have never seen them in real life, but Krissy has caught them in the act a few times and has sent me pictures. 

The HOA doesn’t just complain about grass either. We’ve received a letter earlier this year asking us to paint a section of the trim over our garage that was apparently chipping. I honestly hadn’t noticed it before the letter came and it was a challenge finding a painter who wasn’t trying to charge an arm and a leg just for that tiny section. 

Since we have the USPS Daily Digest service set up, we can see what mail we are getting before driving up to the community mailboxes. We always know when another letter from the HOA is in the box and while we can’t do anything to stop them from coming, at least we can mentally prepare before we open it. 

Krissy and I always question if our other neighbors are getting letters at the same rate that we are. There are other homes in the neighborhood that also have paint chipping on their trim that hasn’t been corrected. Some neighbors have 20 thousand different plants crowding up their front yard or the grass is a foot high. Others have old, decrepit cars that have never moved from their driveway in the two years we’ve lived here while some homes literally have kids toys strewn across their yard AND down the road. 

But yet…..we get letters….pretty frequently? Make it make sense.

I wonder if it’s really that we have issues to correct or if there’s one member of the HOA that loves nitpicking our property over the multiple glaring and egregious concerns some of our neighbors have the pleasure of getting away with. 

On the flip side, maybe our neighbors just don’t care to potentially get fined. Maybe some of them are getting way more letters than we get. There’s no way to ever find out. Of course we could ask, but we don’t speak to our neighbors so that would come off super weird. 

We’re focused on keeping our “transgressions” few and far in between until we’re able to move into a home that doesn’t have an HOA causing grief. 

Signed, 

Jessica Marie