I have yet to meet a single homeowner who actually likes their HOA.

Whether it be aggressively monitoring the growth of their lawn or policing what types of decorations someone can have on their front yard, it just seems like HOA’s are pretty much the worst.

But very rarely have I heard of an HOA whose shady dealings went anything beyond making sure their board members didn’t get penalized for planting gardenias out of season!

However, according to this user’s story a crooked property company actually tried to use an HOA to rope him and his tenants into their property scams!

But OP got the last laugh when they told him to take them to court, which ended up in all of their misdeeds being brought to life!

Check it out!

We’re going to court? OK!

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.

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.

And OP and his wife wanted to be 100% sure that this amazing lack of HOA was protected under law!

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.

This is actually a thing some real estate developers like to do – they’ll buy up a property, and get the title amended to force the membership of that property into a local HoA.

Then they resell it with that as a new requirement for any prospective buyer to automatically agree to when they sign the title.

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.

But when a company began buying up homes in that area, the HOA-less paradise was being threatened!

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 were 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 badly built houses that looked nice from the front moved in one by one and two by two.

And on top of that, the company made it incredibly difficult for the working-class people to keep their homes…

Property values in the area skyrocketed, property taxes skyrocketed right along with them. 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. 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.

But despite the company’s best efforts, OP wasn’t budging!

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 our 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. ANRH starts bothering our tenants there.They tried to get them to pressure us into putting the property into the HoA.

They riled up our tenants with the most outrageous lies about what could happen if we, the owners, don’t ‘protect our renters better’.

When OP realized what was going on, him and his wife were livid!

My wife and I were livid after hearing about this crap. We got ahold of Definitely Not Ryan Homes to let them know that this was our formal request that they stop bothering our tenants.

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 talking about the benefits of the HoA.

And with ANRH not backing off one bit, OP made good on his promise!

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 ANRH 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.

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.

But not only did OP win his court case with ANRH, he also exposed some of the shady legal dealings they had with all of their other proprties!

I’m not sure what kind of lawyer magic my lawyer and his fellow legal demons worked on this front.

But I do know that we were only in court for one single hour when my lawyer, 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 peed on.

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?’

And when OP heard why they settled, he realized just how slimy the company really was!

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 absolutely slammed by the legal system!

If I were a shady property company that knew all of my houses were not properly inspected, the last thing I would do was suggest someone take me to court!

Reddit loved to see a crooked company get their comeuppance, with many wondering if OP had to sign some sort of NDA for his trouble.

Many thought we need more landlords like OP in today’s society.

And there were a slew of people hating on the property company, which was definitely not Ryan Homes.

Finally, this user who lived near OP said the company had financially ruined their friends who bought their houses.

Good riddance, company that is definitely not Ryan homes!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.