Recently you may have seen a new “policy” that was put in place requiring all homeowners to declare if they are renting out their home or not.
If you are renting your home, the Board is requiring $125 a year as a “Rental Registration Fee” for as long as you’re renting your house. I should clarify, Smith Management is charging the Association $125 per registration per year, and the Board decided to pass those costs along to the homeowners.
Personally, I don’t believe this “policy” is worth the paper it’s printed on.
Now, our Indentures do state that the Association has the right to request details about lease agreements in the neighborhood:
ARTICLE XII Section 4;
Leases. No Living Unit shall be rented by the Owner thereof for transient purposes, and all leases of the Living Units shall be expressly made subject to the provisions and conditions of this Indenture and of any rules and regulations adopted by the Directors. Further, no lease of any Living Unit shall be effective unless and until a copy thereof identifying the lessee thereunder and containing the terms herein required has been delivered to the Association.
ARTICLE XIII Section 6;
Notice to Association. Upon request, each Owner shall be obligated to furnish to the Association the name and address of the holder of any Mortgage encumbering such Owner’s Lot.
Now, I joined one of the monthly HoA meetings that are held online through Teams and I asked Holly Wilson, who is our representative from Smith Management, How can the Board justify passing along management expenses to the homeowners like this? Our Indentures are very clear, the Board can not change the assessments without having it put to a vote in which the homeowners can participate. The “policy” that was sent out clearly states that this an assessment:
So call that Red Flag number one.🚩
After the call, I opened up a ticket with the Smith Management company through our Homeowner portal on Town SQ, which if you haven’t already signed up, its actually a great place to view most of our governing documents and put in service requests if you need to contact the management company.
I asked about the contract that the Board signed with Smith, and what other fees the homeowners are going to be expected to pay. The response I got was rather dismissive and a little condescending. Not to mention inaccurate, you can’t be of further assistance when you were no help to begin with! 🤣
Article IX is all about Architectural and Environmental Control. AKA you can’t paint your house pink or build a tennis court without permission. That’s all it covers. ARC requests, nothing about leasing registrations. However, there is a line at the Very end that says:
The Architectural Committee is authorized where it deems appropriate to charge a review fee for any submission to defray the costs of reviews it conducts or authorizes.
So, I guess I could see where Holly would be confused since they already charge us $35 for each ARC submission, but $125 is a great deal more than $35, and objectively not covered under Article IX. Red Flag number two.🚩
What about Article XI? Luckily for me I have the entire Indentures at my fingertips after working on the amendments for months, and I can tell you that Article XI is all about Assessments! It’s pretty long but I’ll give you the highlights.
- Everyone agrees to pay an annual assessment and special assessments.
- The annual assessment can’t be raised year over year by more than an amount which is equal to the increase in the Consumer Price Index.
- Any change to this assessment needs to be voted on by the homeowners. And they must MAIL you a letter.
- Special Assessments must be written up and mailed out to all homeowners and approved with a vote.
So basically, the rules for how the Association can take your money are very well outlined, and any changes to them require a vote by all homeowners. This $125 registration fee is not something that is enabled by our governing documents. Again, Smith Management can charge the Association whatever amount of money they have outlined in their contract for services provided to the Association. However, the Board can’t just decide to charge more money to the homeowners because those service fees are high. They can’t charge us for the cost of stamps or paper used when mailing out the required notifications, why should this expense be any different? Red flag number 3.🚩
I’ve requested an appointment to visit the offices of Smith Management to see the parts of this service contract that they’re allowing me to view. I can only imagine what other fees the Association is paying for that we haven’t seen yet. What if the Board decided to start enforcing Article XII Section 8, Animals? Will we have to pay a “Yearly Animal Registration Fee” to attest that we only have the allowed three dogs, or cats? Rabbits and Birds are not allowed as an FYI.
I’m not even going to start on the Collections Agency…
I’d like to hear from my neighbors, what are your thoughts on these fees, and how much are you willing to pay before something needs to be done about it?
Email me at News@brooksidestl.info and let me know!
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