January 13, 2025 at 4:20 pm

A Home Development Company Kept Harassing Homeowners To Join An HOA, So A Couple Finally Took Them To Court And Found Out The Developers Weren’t Properly Inspecting Their Own Homes

by Michael Levanduski

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance/Shutterstock

Living in your dream home can be great, but when a developer moves in and buys all the property around it, problems may begin.

What would you do if the developer kept harassing you to join the homeowner’s association that they were setting up?

That is what happened to the couple in this story, and eventually, they had to find a way to get it to stop.

Let’s see what they did.

We’re going to court? OK!

The setting: United States, Northern Neck of Virginia.

The situation: Bought land and built a house on it.

Back when my wife and I were much more newly wed than we are now, we hired ourselves an architect and went whole hog on having our cozy little dream home designed.

While this was being done, we went shopping around for a parcel of land on which to have it built, which went quickly and easily, and we even got a pretty nice deal on a half-acre lot that was just far enough back in the sticks for us to be happy, but close enough to our jobs that it wasn’t much of a commute.

That is a huge perk.

Best part of all? No Home Owners Association.

There weren’t any active back in that area because, point-blank, it was full of poor people back there.

Dirt poor country types and working poor wage slave types.

We made very sure with our lawyer that no previous owner had ever had the title amended to allow for any HoA nonsense as well, because that’s a thing some real estate developers like to do.

They’ll buy up a property, get the title amended to force the membership of that property into a local HoA (that they usually operate or are in cahoots with those that do) and then resell it with that as a new requirement for any prospective buyer to automatically agree to when they sign the title.

They moved to a new house but still owned their first dream home.

Flash forward to August of 2019.

Covid was just around the corner, but nobody knew that yet.

Everything was that which passes for normal out in those parts, and my wife and I had since moved to a different location, but retained that property as one of our various rentals.

It was our dream home for several years and we loved that place.

Moving was tough. It was a good neighborhood out there and folks were very welcoming.

Gee, I wonder what company it was.

Then a company that’s totally not named Ryan Homes or anything even slightly similar came in and spent some years buying everything up back there.

That got the market and pressuring folks into selling, which worked out for them only too well.

And of course, they gentrified everything.

For three years and some change, there was massive amounts of the old being torn down and hauled out and the new being built up and sold.

The HoA was built right in, because of course it was.

They could see what was coming.

Folks with money enough to throw down on poorly built houses that looked nice from the front moved in one by one and two by two, property values in the area skyrocketed, property taxes skyrocketed right along with them and more of the poor people were forced to sell because they got taxed out of their own homes.

My wife and I knew what was coming from the get-go.

We knew those dinguses from Totally Not Ryan Homes were going to come sniffing around our way not to try to buy us out, but to see if they could finagle, schmooze or threaten us into joining the HoA they were installing.

It was inevitable.

Lots of information is public record.

They knew we had money.

They knew we were living below our means by two orders of magnitude.

They knew we clearly meant to be exactly where we were because we sure didn’t have to be.

Why would anyone want to join an HOA?

They knew they didn’t have a snowflake’s hope in hell of pricing us out on taxes, so they tried nagging us to death and coming right up to the line on harassment, always to ‘talk to us about joining the HoA’.

They failed.

They got told by One Expensive Lawyer to find something else to do before we all got super busy helping them find things to worry about.

And so they desisted for some years.

Then my wife and I moved and got the property set up as a rental.

Leave the tenants alone!

Absolutely Not Ryan Homes starts bothering our tenants there, both trying to get them to pressure us into putting the property into the HoA as well as getting our tenants riled up with the most outrageous lies about what could happen if we, the owners, don’t ‘protect our renters better’.

My wife and I were livid after hearing about this, and so we got ahold of Definitely Not Ryan Homes to let them know that this was our formal request that they stop bothering our tenants and that all further communications would be from our Really Expensive Lawyer.

They must’ve assumed we were bluffing or maybe whoever was in charge of thinking that day didn’t show up for work, because they just kept right on with their nonsense.

It got so bad that they were even sending fake but convincing-looking envelopes with ‘EVICTION NOTICE’ that, upon being opened, said ‘… Could be what you find in your mailbox one day without our wondrous HOA!’ and containing information about the benefits of the HoA.

Good thing the tenants worked with him on this.

We gathered it all up and got the tenants to talk to our lawyer and got the police involved to get the ball rolling on a harassment investigation.

Another formal request to cease and desist was sent to Never Ryan Homes by the Very Expensive Lawyer, which they…

Utterly ignored.

I think their guy that’s supposed to come to work and think about things quit a long time ago.

Maybe he never told anyone. Maybe nobody noticed.

The lawyer suggested court, so why not?

Whatever the situation on their end, when my lawyer talked to their lawyer, their lawyer told my lawyer that their client was doing everything legally and that if we wanted to pursue the matter in court, that was what we’d have to do.

So we did.

I’m not sure what kind of lawyer magic my lawyer and his fellow legal demons worked on this front, but we were in court for one single hour when my lawyer and their four lawyers and the judge had a private talk after the preliminary hearing.

Half hour later and the lawyers from Maybe Ryan Homes come back into the court room looking like a quartet of cats that had been sprayed with water.

My lawyer takes a seat beside me and says ‘They’re going to settle.’

And I was like ‘I didn’t think we were that far along into this yet. What happened?’

This is a huge mistake.

And he said ‘They built fifty one homes in COUNTY OF CONCERN over two years. Every single one of them was inspected before close of sale by a real estate agent that never actually got around to getting her home inspector license.’

And that’s how Was It Ryan Homes The Whole Time paid me ten grand to not sue them while they had to work through their newly created backlog of home inspections.

Well played, it nice to see a company like this lose once in a while.

Read on to see what the people in the comments had to say about it.

This commenter thinks there is more to the story.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

Good landlords are hard to find.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

It sounds like this company is known for being terrible.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

Time for a class action lawsuit?

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

This person says to inform the tenants so they can spread the word.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

Great job standing up to such a massive homebuilder.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.