When a big company is trying to move into an area and buy up all the homes, you can count on being harassed by them until you sell.

What would you do if you refused to sell, but they kept on harassing you, even after you demanded that they stop?

That is what happened to the homeowner in this story, so he finally sued them and not only won but also got them in lots of trouble for improper inspections in the area.

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 design.

Sounds like a dream.

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.

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.

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.

Life was simple back then.

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.

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.

It’s the way of progress.

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.

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 less-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.

Never join an HOA.

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.

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’.

At least they gave up…for now.

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.

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’.

There is no way they will listen.

My wife and I were livid after hearing about this crap, 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.

How is this type of thing legal?

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.

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.

Never tell a high-priced lawyer you want them to sue.

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.

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?’

Oh my, they can’t do that.

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 got bent over by the county and the state and tag-teamed like the new boy with the pretty lips in a prison yard.

Would it be too much to hope that they had to leave that area entirely?

I’m sure it would, but let’s look at what the people in the comments think of this story.

Good landlords are hard to come by.

It is a great term.

Absolutely!

What a shame.

Yes, they should tell everyone.

Why can’t these HOAs take no for an answer?

There should really be better laws protecting people from them.

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.