HOA forcing me to sell my townhome.....

[Luis Medina]

Looking for some advice/suggestion on my current situation with HOA.We(wife and I) bought a townhome in Jan 2018 for 2011,500. Now we want to move to a better school district for our kids and we thought renting the property. The HOA reached back to us and declined mentioning a rental cap on the community of 20% that currently is at 24% blocking us the option to rent. They left us with two options, leave the home empty/vacant or sell. At this point comps are 230,000.00, but property value are keep going up every year. This is mean reason I do not want to sell.

I ask about moving in a family member to the property and got declined. Proposed a short term lease like 6 months, got declined. I requested evidence of rules and covenants are was provided with, but when request the actual list of renters versus home occupied it was never provided. They are stuck on sell the property or leave it vacant. 

Anything else I can do to finally made them allow my property to be rent it out. 

Thanks in advance

[Kyle J.]

This is actually quite common with HOA's. This would have been disclosed in the CC&R's when you originally bought the property, but I know most people don't read those. However, this shows why it's so important to do so if you want to rent the property or think you might ever end up wanting to.

Not much you can do at this point though beyond the options you’ve already been presented with. I wouldn’t say they’re forcing you to sell though. You have the choice to move or not and if you decide to move they aren’t going to allow you to rent it. Same rules as when you bought it. 

The idea behind it is actually to help keep a certain number of owner-occupants and hopefully preserve your property values. (Sounds like yours are doing quite well too.)