HOA dues responsibility on BUYER

[Dave S.]

Wanted to reach out and understand if this is legal or not for an HOA to do.

Found a short sale property, put it under contract and later (months later) found out that there were almost $20k worth of over due HOA dues.  The HOA was putting this onto me, THE BUYER, to pay! I didn’t sign paperwork stating that was my responsibility...The seller did. Shouldn’t they go after the sellers? 
Can they hold the property sale up for this??? Cause they certainly did. Now the property is foreclosured on and listed for $45k more!  I don’t know how foreclosure works with past due dues, who pays them, are they waived? 
if the HOA purposely dragged their feet to ensure the property got into foreclosure and so that they get paid that’s not right and I’m going to do something about it.

[Justin Abdilla]

I am a lawyer and I take these cases frequently! This happens all the time when the title work is not done properly. The title might read that you're taking subject to outstanding or existing HOA dues. This is super common in short sale properties, but more often it happens in purchases from bank-owned, because the bank will not warrant that the HOA dues are paid in full.

My academic approach here would be to call the title company and make a claim that the title company cleared HOA dues. See if the title company will indemnify the dues. If they won't indemnify the dues, you could try to make a three party declaratory action between yourself, the seller and the HOA to allocate the debt to the Seller.

I'm not sure from your post if you bought it, so that advice considered that you bought it.  If the sale fell through, perhaps it's just time to consider yourself lucky, because you're no longer purchasing a property that is encumbered by $45,000.00 more debt than you thought it was. 

Just be sure, in the future, if you're purchasing from auction.com to make sure that you hunt down that HOA for a paid assessment letter before you sign the ALTA. I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars I've saved my clients THIS YEAR from just being relentless on tracking down HOAs.