Imagine renting a house in an HOA. It could potentially be even worse than owning a house in an HOA. I know that might sound crazy, but here’s why I think that is sometimes true. When you buy a house in an HOA, you get a copy of the bylaws. When you rent a house in an HOA, you don’t. You have to rely on your landlord to tell you what the rules are.

That means that it’s harder to know what the rules are when you’re renting a house in an HOA.

In this story, several roommates are renting a house in an HOA, and their neighbors claim that they’re breaking a lot of rules.

Keep reading for all the details.

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.

The landlord didn’t tell them all of the HOA rules.

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.

The neighbors don’t like her 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.”

The neighbors don’t like a lot of the things these roommates are doing.

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.

Here are more things the neighbors complained about.

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.

OP wants the neighbors to talk to the landlord.

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?

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She could tell the landlord what they’re dealing with and ask for a copy of the HOA rules. That way they can try to avoid breaking the rules and know if the neighbors are lying or not.

Let’s see what Reddit suggests.

Here’s a suggestion to talk to the landlord.

Another person thinks the landlord is ignoring the neighbors.

This person has questions.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a community who realizes their mistake after restricting parking to residents only gets guests and delivery drivers towed.

But this person thinks they may not be a good fit for this HOA community.

If they haven’t actually received any notices from the HOA that they’re violating any rules, then they have nothing to worry about. It could still be a good idea to talk to the landlord though and let him know what the neighbors are saying. Maybe they actually are breaking rules they don’t know about, but maybe they’re not.

Living in an HOA can be pretty stressful.