HOA & GOVERNANCE
From Listings to Living
Most arguments about why HOAs are bad start in the wrong place. Someone got a violation letter about a trash can left out overnight, or a paint color three shades off the approved swatch, and the story ends there. Annoying, yes. But the mailbox fight is not what costs people money.
The expensive problems are financial and structural, and they're mostly invisible on a listing. They are also verifiable before you sign, which is the part worth your afternoon.
Leevli EditorialLast updated 2026-09-17
When you buy into an association, you buy a unit and an obligation. The obligation is open-ended. The board sets the budget, and you pay your allocated share of it whether you agree with it or not.
That share is not trivial. The Census Bureau's analysis of 2024 American Community Survey data, released in September 2025, found 21.6 million of 86.6 million owner households paying a condo or HOA fee. The national median was $135 a month, but roughly 3 million households paid more than $500. In New York, 64% of fee-paying owner households were above $500; in the District of Columbia and Hawaii, close to half were. The 2024 survey was the first ACS year to capture HOA fees alongside traditional condominium fees, so treat it as a new baseline rather than a long trend line.
A median tells you nothing about your building, though. The direction of your own fee is set by costs nobody on your board controls. That's the subject of our breakdown of what actually drives HOA fees up.
Reserve funding is the single most predictive number in an association, and most buyers never look at it. A reserve study projects the remaining life and replacement cost of major components, roofs, elevators, pavement, mechanical systems, and compares that to the money actually in the account. The result is expressed as percent funded.
Association Reserves, which published an analysis of more than 100,000 reserve studies across 25,000-plus properties in April 2026, categorizes anything under 30% funded as weak. By that measure, 34% of the associations in its dataset were weak, 40.3% were in the fair range between 30% and 70%, and only 25.7% were strong. The firm ties weak funding directly to a high likelihood of special assessments, and strong funding to low risk. It also found that associations updating their studies every three years saw roughly half as many new special assessment recommendations as those updating every five.
Translate that: in a third of associations, the money to replace what's wearing out is not there. It will come from you, later, in a lump sum, at a moment you did not choose.
The 2021 partial collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida killed 98 people. NIST released its technical findings on June 22, 2026, and the details deserve to be stated exactly. The investigation traced the collapse to punching shear failure at two connections between garage columns and the pool deck slab, and attributed the building's thin margins against failure to two root causes: severe deviations in the original structural design from the codes and standards of the day, and deviations in construction from the design drawings. Long-term corrosion and later modifications to the pool deck further reduced capacity. NIST ruled out construction vibration, foundation failure, hurricane effects and accidental overloads.
In other words, this was not a story about a board that skipped a paint job. But it is the reason the regulatory floor moved. Florida now requires a structural integrity reserve study at least every 10 years for residential condominium buildings three habitable stories or higher, covering the roof, load-bearing structure, fireproofing and fire protection, plumbing, electrical, waterproofing and exterior painting, and windows and exterior doors. For budgets adopted after December 31, 2024, associations subject to that requirement generally may not vote to provide no reserves or less than the required reserves for those components.
For owners in those buildings, decades of optional underfunding became mandatory funding almost at once. That is a genuine disadvantage of the model, and it is not hypothetical.
The autonomy complaint is the most cited and the least financially serious, but it's not nothing. Exterior paint, roofing material, fencing, solar panels, windows, landscaping, short-term rentals, vehicle type, pet size: any of these can require approval or be prohibited outright, depending on the declaration.
Even residents who like their associations feel it. In the Foundation for Community Association Research's 2024 satisfaction survey of 3,006 residents, the two most-cited worst aspects of association living were paying dues, at 18%, and restrictions on exterior improvements, at 17%.
The important caveat is that a rule in a document is not automatically a rule you have to obey. State and federal law preempts a fair number of HOA restrictions, and rules adopted without the process the documents require can fail on their own terms. That's a separate question worth understanding: which HOA rules are actually unenforceable.
Your board is your neighbors. Some are excellent. Some are running a multimillion-dollar capital asset with no relevant experience, and a few are settling scores.
What makes that structural rather than anecdotal is how little external supervision exists. A Community Associations Institute report published in July 2025 counted only seven established community association ombudsman offices in the country, in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, South Carolina and Virginia, with two more created in Utah and Minnesota in 2025 and not yet fully implemented. Their powers vary sharply. Colorado's office has no regulatory or investigative authority and essentially tracks inquiries. South Carolina's is barred from issuing guidance or adjudicating disputes. Florida's is the strongest, with administrative hearing authority.
Everywhere else, there is no agency to call. Your escalation path runs through internal procedure and then, if it goes that far, court, on your own money. Attorney fee exposure is a real cost of association disputes, and depending on your state and your documents, a losing owner can end up covering the association's legal fees as well as their own.
The collection side escalates on its own schedule too. Unpaid assessments typically trigger late fees, interest, suspension of amenity and voting rights, and in many states an automatic lien. The mechanics are worth knowing before you're inside them, and we walk through what happens when HOA fees go unpaid.
If the case above were the whole picture, the model would be shrinking. It is growing instead.
In the same 2024 survey, 86% of residents rated their community association experience as good or neutral, 82% said board members serve the community's best interests absolutely or for the most part, 63% said the rules protect or enhance property values, and only 7% said the rules harm them. Sixty-two percent said their assessments were about right or too low.
Formal complaints are also rare where they can be filed. In the states with ombudsman offices, reported complaint volumes represented somewhere between 0.008% and 0.077% of association residents. That number deserves a caveat the raw figure hides: in 43 states there is no office to complain to, so low complaint counts measure availability as much as satisfaction.
And the alternative isn't free. A non-association home doesn't have a reserve study because you are the reserve study. The roof, the driveway and the water heater are still coming; the difference is whether the saving is pooled and scheduled or left to you. Associations exist because someone has to own the shared parts, which is the argument laid out in our companion piece on why HOAs exist in the first place.
Nearly everything above is discoverable. Most states require the association to hand over a disclosure package, and the contents are specified by statute. Virginia's resale certificate requirements are a good template for what to demand anywhere: assessment amounts and payment schedules, unpaid assessments, any approved additional or special assessment, reserves for capital expenditures, the current operating budget, the current reserve study or a summary, approved capital expenditures for the current and following fiscal years, board minutes for the past six months, unsatisfied judgments and pending actions against the association, insurance coverage and which deductibles owners are responsible for, and restrictions on rentals, parking, signs, flags and solar devices.
Work through that package looking for these eight things:
Two structural checks round it out. Confirm which state statute governs the association, because reserve rules, disclosure deadlines and enforcement procedure all vary by state and by whether you're in a condominium or a lot-based community. And read the recorded documents themselves rather than a summary: the order of authority among declaration, bylaws and rules decides which provision wins when two conflict.
For most buyers in most new construction markets, avoiding them means narrowing the search to older inventory, and that trade has its own costs. The more useful decision is which association you buy into.
A community with a $520 fee, a reserve study updated last year and 78% funding is in better shape than one with a $290 fee, no study and a roof at the end of its life. The second one looks cheaper right up until it isn't. Price the fee against the reserve position, not against the fee next door.
Then get the part that never appears in a disclosure package. Ask people who live in the building how the board handles bad news, how long repairs take, and what the last assessment paid for. Ask a Resident exists for exactly that question, and it's the cheapest due diligence available before you commit six figures to someone else's capital plan.
The disclosure package shows the association's numbers. A resident shows you how the board behaves when those numbers get uncomfortable.
Listings show the property, but they rarely explain the lived reality around it. On Leevli, a mover can explore the city, review neighborhood and building information, and ask a verified resident the specific questions that remain unanswered. That human layer helps readers know what to investigate before signing a lease, making an offer, or choosing between two addresses.
The costly ones are financial: an open-ended obligation to fund a budget you don't control, exposure to a special assessment when reserves are thin, and legal costs if a dispute reaches court. The daily irritations, approval for exterior changes and limits on pets or parking, rank high in resident surveys but rarely change what a home costs you across a decade of ownership.
In many associations, yes, within whatever limits the declaration and state law impose. Some documents cap the annual increase a board can adopt without a membership vote. Others leave the budget entirely to the board. A number of states require the proposed budget to be circulated and a meeting held first. Read the assessment article of your declaration and your state's condominium or planned community act before assuming a ceiling exists.
Most states set no cap. The amount is the project cost divided by your ownership percentage, which is why roofs, elevators, piping and structural repairs produce the painful ones. Some declarations require a membership vote above a dollar threshold, so check yours. The reserve study is the best early warning available, since thin funding correlates closely with assessments arriving later.
Association Reserves treats anything below 30% funded as weak, 30% to 70% as fair, and above 70% as strong, and ties weak funding to a high likelihood of special assessments. Percent funded compares cash on hand to the projected replacement need, not to the annual budget. The figure is only as current as the study behind it, so check the date the study was last updated.
Almost never, when the covenant is recorded against your lot. Membership runs with the land, so it binds whoever owns the property. Dissolving an association generally takes a supermajority of owners, lender consent and a recorded amendment, and in condominiums it is harder still. The real decision happens before closing, by buying outside a covenanted community rather than by trying to leave one.
That deadline comes from state law and varies widely. Statutes typically give the association a set number of days after a written request, and give the buyer a cancellation window that starts when the package is delivered. Virginia's resale certificate statute is a good template for the contents to demand anywhere. Ask your agent to put your state's delivery deadline in writing, because your cancellation clock usually depends on it.
Percent funded under 30%. A reserve study older than five years, or none at all. A reserve contribution that is a token share of the operating budget. An approved but unlevied special assessment. A high delinquency rate. Pending litigation or unsatisfied judgments. A percentage-based master policy deductible in a wind or hail state. Six months of minutes arguing about a repair nobody has funded yet.
In most states, no agency does. Seven states had established community association ombudsman offices as of July 2025, with two more created that year and not yet fully operating, and their powers range from simply logging inquiries to holding administrative hearings. Everywhere else the escalation path runs through internal dispute procedures and then the courts, at your own expense. Check whether your state has an office before counting on one.
Residents largely believe so. In the 2024 Foundation for Community Association Research survey, 63% said the rules protect or enhance property values and 7% said they harm them. That is opinion rather than appraisal evidence. What shows up in a real transaction is the association's financial condition, because a buyer's lender looks at delinquency, litigation and reserves long before it looks at the landscaping.
Late fees and interest come first, then suspension of amenity and voting privileges, then a recorded lien in many states, with collection costs and legal fees stacked on the original balance. In most states the association can eventually foreclose that lien. The full sequence, including how payment plans get negotiated, is in our walkthrough of what happens when HOA fees go unpaid.
Editorial review: verify current federal and state law, insurance regulations, HOA and condominium statutes, and lender guidelines before relying on any single claim. This article is informational and does not constitute legal, financial, tax or insurance advice.
