If you were renting a home that was part of an HOA, what would you do if the HOA members who lived in your neighborhood claimed you were breaking the HOA rules?

Would you ignore them since you’re not the homeowner, or would you agree to follow the HOA rules?

The roommates in today’s story are in this situation, and they think the HOA members should talk to their landlord.

Let’s see why the HOA members keep complaining.

AITA for ignoring the HOA in the house my friends and I rent?

My friends Jess, Megan, and I rent a house.

We’re all recent college graduates, young professionals, and we’re decent roommates to each other and decent neighbors, as far as I can tell.

The house we rent is part of a homeowners association, and the way the laws work is that the HOA has a legal contract with the homeowner.

And the homeowner who is leasing out a property has a legal contract with his tenants.

But the HOA has no authority over the tenants legally; it’s on the landlord to include the HOA rules in his lease with the tenants.

There weren’t a lot of HOA rules in the lease.

Anyway, some of the HOA rules were in the lease, like only having cars parked in the garage and driveway, none on the street.

And like no political signage in the front yard.

But there were relatively few; the lease was pretty much your standard lease.

Anyway, neighbors have come over several times to tell us about HOA laws were breaking.

Not just the same few neighbors, there have been like 8.

They complained about his car.

For example:

They said we could not have junker cars in the driveway, and I was like “it’s not a junker, it runs, I drive it everyday. Plus you should be taking this stuff to Landlord, he’s the homeowner in your association.”

The guy went off on me about how having car’s like mine around lowers the property value.

And I was like “my agreement was with Landlord, my lease says nothing about what cars I can have.”

HOA members complained about a lot more things.

They don’t like how my roommate has astrology wall tapestries over the windows instead of curtains.

Or how we have a fire pit outside.

Or how many friends we have over even though we never break the rules about cars. Few of our friends drive.

They told my roommate it’s not allowed to do DIY projects like woodworking or car maintenance in the drive way.

And told me about noise rules that do not line up with the city noise ordinance.

They told my roommate her friends can’t lock their bicycles up to the deck railing.

The neighbors make excuses and won’t leave them alone.

Anyway, every time, we tell these people, that their contract is with the homeowner. And our contract is with our landlord. We’re following our contract, their contract is between them and Landlord.

And they’ve complain that The landlord is hard to get a reach of, he travels a lot, he’s not communicative. And we are the ones living in the community, we need to follow it’s rules.

AITA for blowing all them off?

I would be so annoyed with these neighbors! It sounds like they complain about everything!

I don’t think she did anything wrong by ignoring them, but they’ll probably keep complaining.

But, what should these renters do? Let’s see if Reddit has any suggestions.

This person agrees that the HOA needs to talk to the homeowner.

This person suggests talking to the landlord.

Another person thinks their landlord is probably ignoring the HOA.

This person goes against the grain, saying with that many complaints, these renters must be in the wrong.

They probably aren’t even breaking any HOA rules.

This time.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.