Horry residents love to complain about their HOAs. Could data lead to new laws?

For about eight years, Irena Hristova’s cat Billy roamed her Carolina Forest neighborhood freely. Billy would walk about, explore, and occasionally visit neighbors who would offer pets in return.

Until 2019, that is.

In the middle of that year, Hristova said, the leadership of her neighborhood’s homeowner’s association (HOA) changed, and the new leaders began aggressively enforcing rules and bylaws that hadn’t been enforced for years prior. She began receiving formal complaints about Billy, she said, and now faces $150 in fines for letting her cat, now 10 years old, out of the house.

Hristova tried putting up a fence in the backyard of her townhouse and training Billy to wear a harness to go on walks, but it was to no avail. The crackdown plus coronavirus pandemic has left both of them stuck inside and miserable, she said, and she’s considered moving out of the neighborhood. She felt the complaints and fines were unfair, but felt she had no recourse to push back against her HOA. Other neighbors have faced fines and complaints for minor issues, like crooked blinds, she said.

“We have a ‘Mean Girls’ type of situation in my neighborhood,” she said.

Hristova isn’t alone. Across Horry County, dozens of other residents of HOA communities have complained about their elected boards or management companies, taking the step of lodging formal complaints with South Carolina’s Department of Consumer Affairs. Throughout 2020, 64 people filed complaints about their HOA, the department reported earlier this week. A new law passed in 2018 compelled the department to begin collecting the data, and Horry County has lead the state in the number of complaints for two years now, in part because of the prevalence of HOAs here.

And now, that complaint data could lead to new legislation in Columbia to better regulate the pseudo-governmental bodies that oversee so many neighborhoods and subdivisions.

“There needs to be some oversight and some accountability,” said state Rep. Heather Ammons Crawford (R-Socastee), the lead sponsor on the 2018 bill to collect the HOA data, and one of the lawmakers who plans to meet several weeks from now to discuss drafting further oversight legislation of HOAs. “Not all HOAs operate poorly, (but) unfortunately there are some bad actors.”

According to the Dept. of Consumer Affairs’ data, released earlier this week, concerns about how an HOA or management company handled repairs or maintenance, disputes over HOA fees, inaction by an HOA and failures to enforce community bylaws all top the list of complaints from residents.

Other residents complained that their HOA wasn’t allowing them to access common areas or neighborhood amenities, a common complaint due to the pandemic, said Bailey Parker, the director of communications for the Department of Consumer Affairs.

Still, other complaints reveal the lack of oversight of, or uniform rules for HOAs.

“The board needs to go,” one person wrote.

“The HOA should administer violations equally and not discriminate,” wrote another.

“Just enforce the rules and regulations,” another person wrote.

When it comes to fixes, some residents who filed formal complaints said they’d like to see more state oversight, or would like to see HOAs follow the open meeting rules that governments and other public bodies have to follow. Others suggested putting an ombudsman in place to oversee HOAs, someone who could review complaints and take action on behalf of residents.

But despite the fact that the Dept. of Consumer Affairs has collected such complaint data for several years now, there’s little the they can do to remedy the situations residents write in to complain about.

“There is no regulatory body for HOAs, and that includes us,” Parker said. “We have no ability to force an HOA to do anything. We do have enforcement authority in other areas, but HOAs are not one of those areas.”

The most the SCDCA can do after a resident files a complaint against an HOA or a management company is invite both parties to engage in voluntary arbitration. The data shows that the department’s involvement has a positive impact — after responding to a complaint, the department was able to record positive resolutions in more than two-thirds of cases. The department’s process is also timely; complaints were resolved within 40 days on average, the data shows.

New HOA oversight?

With two-and-a-half years of data now compiled, lawmakers in Columbia said they’re now able to begin discussions on if further regulation of HOAs is needed. Ammons Crawford said those meetings are scheduled to begin in a few weeks and from there she and her colleagues will be able to draft new legislation.

It’s not yet clear what new legislation overseeing HOAs could include, though measures requiring more transparency could be on the list, Ammons Crawford suggested. Many complaints include some element of a resident not knowing when meetings were or how to access HOA bylaws.

“Transparency is the number one thing, so that homeowners know what the rules and regulations are, they know what the fees are, they know when the meetings are,” Ammons Crawford said. “You deserve to know who’s serving on your board and who’s representing you.”

Would state oversight help, or hurt?

Bob Sweet, a resident of an HOA community in Carolina Forest, said more uniformity for HOAs could help with a problem he’s been working on for months. He’s helping to lead an effort in his community and elsewhere to have Santee Cooper replace the streetlights in his neighborhood — which he and his neighbors lease from the electricity cooperative — with more affordable models so they can save some money. The developer that built their subdivision selected an expensive model of streetlight that’s costlier to lease each month than other models, Sweet said, and negotiations between neighbors, the utility and local lawmakers is ongoing. However, Sweet said, HOA boards fire and hire management companies fairly often, a factor that complicates the negotiations he and his neighbors have been involved in.

“They opt out of one company and go to someone else. That turnover contributes to the problem we have,” he said. “That contributes to the perpetuation of the issue with the light posts.”

John Smith, the president of an HOA board in Socastee, also works for a company that serves other HOAs and knows many of the issues that arise between residents, boards and management companies well. Several years ago, he and his HOA board voted to change management companies, and selected another firm to process dues payments and upkeep common areas in the neighborhoods. The decision took some residents by surprise, he said, and they used a provision in their bylaws to call a special meeting with the board.

“The first 15 minutes I was being yelled at,” Smith said.

Smith said most problems in HOA communities could be solved by residents reading the bylaws of their communities and understanding what they’re allowed to do, and what they’re not, and what the HOA is and isn’t allowed to do. Some HOA boards can get “a little tyrannical.”

“I think a lot of it falls on people being ignorant,” he said. “I’ve had numerous conversation with folks and they don’t have a full understanding of their documents.”

Smith said he’s not sure if more oversight of HOAs by the state is needed, and said he thinks there’s enough transparency already. But, he admitted, HOAs, including the one he runs, doesn’t always do a good job at effective communication with residents.

“My mistake when we changed management companies is that I didn’t engage with the membership,” he said. “My mistake is that I didn’t communicate. And I think that happens a lot.”

This story was originally published February 9, 2021 at 8:04 AM.