How Much Inconvenience Should Your Condo/HOA Owners Have to Tolerate?

In this week's tip, we take the case of a poster on Reddit (actually a subreddit for people griping about their HOA!) to ask a broader question: Is it your job as a condo or HOA to ensure that your owners are never inconvenienced?

The Redditor says their HOA is requiring they move their car for five days for parking repaving.

This kind of “you can't use an area” inconvenience to owners can happen in all kinds of situations: parking, elevator repair, hallway or lobby painting, and so on.

So we've asked our experts: Have you seen your client boards offer creative solutions to help owners when your necessary maintenance inconveniences them? Or is this not the board's problem, and owners simply need to figure out their own solutions?

Redditors can rail at HOAs (seems to be a sport these days, doesn't it?). But all kinds of factors can cause disruption in people's daily lives, and living in an HOA is no different.

“The first point I'd make is that this happens whether you're in an association or a homeowner in a municipality,” says James P. Arrigo, a partner at Rathje Woodward in Wheaton, Ill., who has counseled and represented HOA and condominium associations ranging from 3 to 1,950 units for more than 20 years. “Sometimes the work needs to be done, and the city or town might say, ‘By the way, your street is going to be closed for a few days.'

“In fact, I live in a cul de sac off a state highway,” he states. “When they rebuilt the highway, maybe about 12 years ago, there was a span of a couple of days when we couldn't physically get a car to our home. They gave us notice, and I just worked from home for a couple of days. It is what it is. Associations have to deal with things the same way. Things need to be repaired.”

That's also the thinking of Melissa S. Doolan, an attorney at The Travis Law Firm in Phoenix, who has represented community associations for the last 15 years. “If the roads need to be repaved, there's not much choice the associations has,” she says. “The association has the duty to maintain the common areas.”

All that said, it's the rare condo or HOA board that tells its owners to pound sand.

reposted from HOA Leader