Key Points:
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• New Florida laws have introduced protections for homeowners against HOA overreach, focusing on accountability and preventing arbitrary fines for minor infractions like garbage cans left out or holiday decorations.
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• Recent changes address parking restrictions, allowing residents to park pickup trucks and work vehicles in driveways—a significant win for those previously fined or forced to find alternative parking.
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• Florida’s HOA industry has grown into a $38 billion sector with increased professional management, yet transparency issues persist, with some homeowners struggling to access clear financial information on fees and fines.
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• Introducing an ombudsman for HOA oversight offers residents a new resource for addressing disputes, election transparency, and preventing fraud, providing a more accessible alternative to legal action.
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• The power dynamic within HOAs remains controversial, with some board members using their roles for excessive control, but the new laws now impose penalties for unethical actions like election tampering and financial mismanagement.
Florida’s HOA Battle: New Laws, Hidden Traps, and How Homeowners Can Fight Back
There are incredible changes unfolding in Florida’s housing market as it relates to real estate located under homeowner association communities. Recent changes to laws in this state should absolutely have a crippling effect on the massive grip that HOAs have historically had on the public.
But knowing how HOAs, how clever and how vindictive they can be, releasing that power does not come so easily. And even with more guards in the laws, I believe that most HOAs count on the public being ignorant to what these changes are. And with most folks having no idea what they cover, they may find themselves under regulations in their own neighborhoods, which are an absolute violation of law.
Now, there’s a lot of misinformation circulating about what these laws entail. There’s just downright confusion and underreporting in many cases about letting consumers know what powers they have to fight back without having to go through expensive lengthy court battles. If you live in an HOA now or you’re considering coming to Florida, I’m going to show you how avoiding an HOA is nearly unavoidable.
Today, I’m going to expose three common traps that HOAs are still imposing regardless of the law around Florida. And additionally, I’m going to give you three huge upsides which you as a consumer need to know about so that you can fight back and even have knowledge of when your HOA is acting unlawfully. This is such a crazy story that you’ll have to hold on to your seat.
Before you do that, dive down below and smash that thumbs up so that we can help as many consumers as possible know how to avoid HOA hassles like the ones we’re going to talk about today. Let’s dive in. Record high mortgage levels are starting to take their toll.
The mortgage rate is at 14.75%. Ask not what the great reset can do for you. Ask what you can do for the great reset. Now, people call me all the time saying, Jared, Jared, I do not want to live in an HOA and I cringe for a moment and say, you know what? The statistics show that really all the recent construction has been put in a homeowners association. You saw the stat that 84% of all the new construction, recent new builds are all built under homeowners association. The odd thing is people will call me and say both.
I want a new home, but I also don’t want to live in HOA. And that’s nearly an impossible proposition. And by the way, the 16% of the homes that weren’t built in an HOA were probably very high in customs or maybe some brand new mobile home or tiny home that was dropped on a lot somewhere in the boonies.
Now, if the statistics around recent new builds were bad enough, guess what? Florida has nearly one half of all communities are under the management of an HOA. And that represents one of the highest percentages in the entire country. So the sheer fact of you just moving to the state of Florida is most likely going to put you in a position where the majority of the inventory you see will be in an HOA and honestly, over the past four or five years, this kind of flies in the face of why so many people moved here. A lot of people recently moved here because they got really weirded out about regulation and governance and where they came from. And then they come here and the last thing they want to do is fall under it in their own neighborhood.
I get it. World’s best boss. And the rest of you out there are having a good laugh because you say, hey, you know what, Jared, this is Florida.
Those people need HOAs. You know, we’ve heard all the stories. It’s like, Jared, isn’t there a guy in every neighborhood that has a five story flagpole like they have at the bank? Come on, I know Floridians.
Those are the ones likely to have a 20 story shortwave radio tower in their backyard. And why do they need that, Jared? Do they talk to their friends in Australia? Jared, Floridians also seem like do-it-yourselfers. I mean, I couldn’t imagine living next door to somebody who drops a transmission in their front yard.
Has this as a running project for six months and all the while there’s flowers growing out of the transmission? They think they’re flowers. They’re actually weeds. Jared, I’ve driven through Florida neighborhoods.
I’ve seen some of those neighbors paint their house like it’s a neon pink flamingo shrine. Yeah, and Floridians, at least those with like half acre lot tend to dig big holes in them. People in other states call them koi ponds.
We call them mini alligator petting zoos. So yeah, sometimes we need HOAs. So yeah, yeah, there’s some pros with the HOA.
In an HOA, you expect your neighborhood to be nicer because those HOAs manage the common elements. They’re going to make sure that somebody paints the entry sign and somebody plants little flowers in the little community flower bed. But it’s their second mandate that a lot of people have a problem with.
They manage you. They manage you and the neighbors. They oftentimes tell you what color you can paint your house.
They can tell you how tall your bushes can be. And that’d be amazing if that were the end of the story. But the cons are very real too.
And that’s because HOAs can wield tremendous power. If they don’t like what you do, they can actually create and then enact a rule that impacts your life. Then, if you violate said rule, they will impose fines.
If you don’t pay the fines, they will stack up with interest and attorney’s fees. And if that fine stack gets tremendously high, they will use various forms of collections like leaning your house. And worse above worse is that the HOA has a final act of collection power called foreclosure, where they can actually take your property out from underneath you to sell it for the proceeds.
Navigating the Minefield of Homeowners Associations in the Sunshine State
Now, here in Florida, we have a unique power dynamic that makes all of this even worse. We have the state of Florida, which I just told you is the highest amount of HOA-infused communities that while at the same time have a large number of retired population without full-time jobs, ready to join the board in order to manage the neighborhood. And listen, my point here about this is not an ageist thing.
This is a human being thing. And some people can just be really mean and ruthless to their neighbors. And some folks just get off on the idea of running an HOA as if they were like the dictator of their own mini-town and they will operate in this way with in many cases egregious overreach, which thankfully many laws have been enacted by the governor and state houses of Congress here in Florida, which now make some of these egregious overreaches a violation of law. But I will tell you, my friends, they will still try and get away with it if you are ignorant enough to know what these laws are. And for this, I’m going to point them out on this video.
So that in the case where you get pushed around, you can fight back. But your crazy neighbor isn’t the only person you now have to look out for. Because being in the HOA business has now become a massive corporate profit center.
Check this out. Professional involvement in HOAs is increasing, with the for-profit homeowner association industry growing to $38 billion. Jessica and Matt have been fighting for more transparency about where their HOA fines are going.
We had four months of pulling teeth. We wanted a general ledger, but they gave us a balance sheet and a budget. Now I have a unique perspective on this because over 20 years of selling nearly 4,000 homes, I’ve had many, many run-ins with HOAs.
Many of you, if you’ve ever sold a house in HOA, you are furious either on the buy side when you have to pay huge, steep transfer fees, a tax to buy into the neighborhood and own the house. And a nearly unanimous complaint is when you sell your house, the HOA charges you, in some cases, $300, $400, just to take five minutes to pull the account ledger and send it to the title company to say that you are all paid up and you don’t actually owe them any money. What a rip-off.
It’s good money for corporations, though. I wish I could charge that for five minutes of work. I had an owner one time that owned a house for six years.
As he’s going to sell it, the HOA says, you have to demolish the shed in your backyard. The shed was in his backyard six years ago when he bought the house. And it’s in his backyard.
No one can even see it. I’ve heard of HOA inspectors going on people’s property, looking around, touching people’s personal belongings. I’ve heard of HOAs thinking they’re a military base, literally checking everyone’s ID on the way in.
Now, hold up. You might be thinking, well, Jared, no, no, that’s guest access. No, no, no.
I’m telling you, a neighborhood full of thousands of people were told at Christmas one year that even though we had car transponders to let us through the gate, they were going to shut the gate and do manned ID checking to make sure only us neighbors were getting into the community. What the heck? I’ve heard of people buying in the neighborhoods where thousands of dollars were not paid from the previous owner that the HOA then levied against the new owner who, when the new owner would not pay, the HOA decides to lock their gate access down to where they cannot get in the neighborhood to the home they own. Now, yes, it’s one thing that they have collection power, but the police had to be called because this happens.
The Rise of Power, Corruption, and Financial Mismanagement
This has happened on more than one occasion that I’ve heard personally of HOAs limiting access to actual owners getting in their neighborhood. I’ve heard of HOAs towing cars out of people’s driveway. Example of which I’ll show you here in a minute.
This has actually happened to me personally. Here’s a beautiful example of one here in Orlando. The couple put in more than $10,000 worth of landscaping to their lawn, including these decorative white rocks.
Now they may have to remove all of them. The association says these white rocks around Demarest and Jose Heinsohn’s home violate the neighborhood bylaws. The couple got a letter saying they have two weeks to remove the stones.
To my amazement, we got a letter in the mail saying that, you know, we can’t have the white rocks. Like most HOAs, the Heinsohn’s requires property owners to get approval before making certain changes to the exterior of their home, including landscaping. The Heinsohn’s admit they didn’t follow those rules. You know, we take the initiative to make, to give the house some curb appeal. We just had the house painted and everything without a letter from them. Mind you, we were probably one of the last ones in the neighborhood to paint the house and we never got a letter about our house looking bad because we were always on top of it with pressure wash.
A South Bay homeowner contacted Team 10 saying his HOA towed his car, even though he’s parked in the same spot for years. When we came home, we were shocked. Cecilio went on vacation with his wife late last year for a couple weeks.
He parked this car in front of his home. When he returned… We were shocked because my car, which was parked here, was missing. Cecilio thought it was stolen, but when he contacted property management, someone told him it was towed.
Make no mistake that one thing you must keep your eye on is the power dynamic within your own HOA. 57% of homeowners polled disliked living in an HOA, with more than 3 in 10 homeowners saying they feel like the HOA has too much power. People need to understand how much power a board of directors has.
Governments are giving the power of the municipality to these communities. They act as hyper-local governments and in many ways supersede all the other laws that exist when you sign into a covenant that runs with the land. A homeowners association usually enacts the CCNRs as well as the bylaws that outline procedural matters when it’s incorporated by the subdivision developer.
The board in the beginning is controlled by the developer. So it starts out as a board of people that are paid on behalf of the developer to operate that community. And it transitions 100% of the time, in some cases it takes years, in other cases it might only take one or two years, to a set of volunteers and that Lloyd has no right to privacy from the association, identifying a car parked in a driveway. He says HOAs don’t have unfettered rights to do what they want. What happens often times is that members of the board overreach in their zeal to do the right thing and he says homeowners rights in an HOA are not absolute. That’s when the rules have to be clear to and for everyone. Now setting all the power grabbing aside, if that weren’t bad enough, you have copious amounts of fraud.
You have mismanagement of funds. You have money that people cannot see or understand of where it is being spent. You have a member of the board of the HOA giving their uncle a special $3 million contract, but yet nobody can figure out where all the work is being done.
And we often hear stories of HOAs on the take all around Florida. We’re not paying for the lawyers for the criminal acts of the board members that were arrested. Five people were arrested this week, former and current board members of the Hammocks Community Center, charged with stealing millions of dollars.
We used to pay quarterly $280. This man was told that his house would be foreclosed on if he refused to pay the increased fees for maintenance. The Hammocks Community Association is now under a receivership following a multimillion dollar fraud case.
Residents of the community packing the courthouse today as a judge handed down that ruling and they were celebrating in court. Everyone is just cheering, so happy because they dismantled their HOA that they say was stealing millions of dollars from the folks that live here. Check out what they have to say.
So here’s the instruction. There’s a receiver that is appointed and they now control the Hammocks. The courtroom was packed with homeowners who are finally getting justice.
So your employers do not work there anymore. So gather your body and leave. Meanwhile at the Hammocks.
Let’s go ask them to come down here and secure everything. In a matter of minutes, employees started leaving the premises in the midst of joy and screams. One homeowner taking video of their departure.
I feel relieved. It’s been a long year. Now the sad thing is when it comes to the financials, stories like these are harder to figure out because we are in an inflationary environment.
Florida's HOA Nightmare Ends? New Law Tackles Fines, Parking, and Holiday Lights
HOAs now know that insurance costs are exploding for the Florida resident. They know that, hey, their tax bills are going through the roof. There’s a pretense now with the Florida homeowner that the HOA knows they can now double the bill or gouge on their fees and with the inflation of everything piling on, jacking up the fees and creating some mismanagement in what they’re spending the money on or who it’s going to, those kinds of things in an environment like this are more likely to go unnoticed. James’s townhome is a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath that’s just over 2,600 square feet. In 2022, he and his neighbors paid $424 a month.
This year, they paid $758 a month. And next year, the proposal is $1,222.42 per month. That’s nearly a 300% increase in two years.
So the good news is for homeowners, there’s a new law that passed. It is a lengthy bill, a lot of pages that is in depth. And as I see it, it is a big win for the homeowner.
As an overview, the law pushes for more accountability for board members. It requires them to provide more transparency in how they rule over their neighborhoods. It puts a halt and a standard to some of the more crazier fines that they try and impose.
Let’s talk about three main traps this law seeks to prevent. So in Florida, you hear this story all the time. People put their garbage can out.
If it’s there for two hours too long, they get nailed with a fine. Right now, you have sort of a 48-hour window that limits the HOA from any type of fining. 24 hours before the pickup and 24 hours after the pickup.
The HOAs cannot fine you if you leave the garbage can out during that time domain. A second big common issue is holiday displays. You know it.
This is Florida. You got those Christmas lights up year round. But some HOAs have very intense guardrails.
Hey, six days into January, those Christmas lights had better be down. The law now provides that the HOA must give you a seven-day written notice from when they believe you need to have those lights down. They don’t deliver it.You cannot be fined. This is good because I’ve seen a lot of HOAs try and operate off of emails in this particular instance. And some people are just not seeing the notices.
Now, the third step that this law covers is parking. And this is a big one. A lot of people complain about this particular point of HOAs.
Particularly, there was a rule along a lot of HOAs that required certain vehicles to be parked in the garage. Now, this was a big factor for people with pickup trucks because Floridians own trucks. HOAs would fine people for having trucks parked in their driveway. With everything going on, you may be thinking of buying, selling, or investing in real estate. No matter where you are in the country, my team can help. Call or text us at 706-5000.
That’s 407-706-5000. Shoot us an email at info at jaredjones.com. That’s I-N-F-O at jaredjones.com or visit jaredjones.com. Let’s get back to the video. Now, the car, they wouldn’t fine but the truck, they would. So under this new law, HOAs are not allowed to restrict you from being able to park a pickup truck in your own driveway. And another big one is work vehicles.
A lot of people are issued work vehicles and the HOA did not want anything like that parked anywhere near their house. Rick’s AC on the side, something like that. No, you can’t have that.
This new law says if it’s a work issue vehicle, you can’t stop them from parking it. And a really cool thing is there’s actually some specific carve outs in this law for first responders because believe it or not, people bringing home police cars, different types of public use first responder type vehicles, we’re told that they cannot park. And by the way, this law isn’t just for the owner of the house.
It’s also for tenants of a home or even guests that you have over that for instance, might be a personal responder that has a police car. It essentially says if the municipality says they can have that vehicle, you cannot override them and create a rule inside the community. This is a big deal because particularly on this parking point, I’ve heard a lot of people up and just sell their home because they were so sick of dealing with the HOA on their pickup truck.
And even beyond that, a lot of people I know throughout Florida were actually paying for offsite parking. They would park a vehicle down the street for $100 a month. Every day they drive from home in their personal vehicle to go get another vehicle that was paid to park just because they couldn’t have this vehicle at home.
Negated not only the cost of a parking space, but they also had to keep a duplicate vehicle just to travel to get it. But they also had to keep an additional personal vehicle to travel to the parking lot that they ordinarily wouldn’t have needed because they already have a truck. It’s crazy in the first place to think you actually need a law written for all these things, but you do but we all know HOAs get hung up on specific things, then they get nitpicky and then they start to beat up the neighborhood. And as I mentioned earlier, those fines and penalties can add up and then there becomes a risk that you lose your home over it. An additional thing I will point out is that when we’re selling you a home, when we work with a realtor, there’s a lot of work that’s usually done up front to make sure you have all the guidelines that you’re getting into when you move into a neighborhood.
Florida HOA Wars: New Laws Fight Back Against Power-Tripping Boards, Fines, and Mismanagement
Now these new laws also require the association that as soon as you move into the home, they are going to be forced to go into constant detail about what you have opted into in their neighborhood and any amendments and changes they make into the future. The responsibility is now on the board and the HOA to push the information to you, whereas before they’re like, oh, if you don’t show up to the meeting, then surprise, it’s a rule that we pass when you weren’t there. In the old way, people typically find out that the rules were changed as they were getting notices for violating them because up until now, the HOAs did not have any responsibility to update you that they just changed the rules and again, I don’t want to paint with a broad brush. All HOAs are not a terror to live under. Many HOAs have always over communicated, but I’ve only given you a sliver of the stories that I have.
Now, some of these recent bills have built on previous laws that have been passed over the past two years, which absolutely affects some important things such as what happens in your backyard. I’ve heard stories of HOA inspectors going onto people’s premises to see over their fences and things of that nature. New laws have been passed that says, hey, you know what? If people have something in their backyard, they can do that.
Some HOAs had limitations to what you could build inside your very home. The new law says, hey, you know what? If it’s not visible to the HOA, meaning in the front side of the house, you cannot manage what the owner does or builds inside their home. I’ve seen these kinds of covenants with my own eyes.
HOA saying, hey, you can’t build out your garage. What? That’s crazy. So residents in the past, if you wanted to plant that vegetable garden, your HOA gave you a hard time, you want to go back to the early 1900s and start a clothesline in your backyard? Knock yourself out, my friends.
There’s a host of other things that I’ve not covered which are limiting the HOA’s conflicts of interest that creates fraud and scams, sweetheart deals and nepotism. There’s limitations that HOAs cannot force you to work with preferred vendors and preferred contractors and all that nonsense. But one of the most important additions to homeowners, this was already afforded to condo owners, but with the recent passage of these bills, there’s now what’s called an ombudsman.
If you’re not familiar with an ombudsman, it is a state enacted office purely there to keep oversight on the HOAs, how they vote, how they install people, conflict resolution. Before now, you most likely had to go legal if you wanted to put pressure on your HOA. But there’s now a feature in the law for an ombudsman to be installed across Florida for the HOAs, and this is a huge, huge thing. You have to know because you’re going to need help. HOAs are going to buck the system. Here’s proof.
Welcome back. Well, tonight, RIT, and we’ve told you recently about a new state law preventing homeowners associations from banning pickup trucks and work trucks from parking in driveways. That law, Wendy, just took effect.
Yeah, that’s right. But since then, Sarasota homeowners reached out to investigator Adam Walser saying their HOA does not plan to change. I cannot park my own truck in my own driveway. His subdivision, the Meadows, doesn’t allow pickup trucks or commercial vehicles in their driveways between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. based on rules written in 1976 before Jimmy Carter first took office. Violators caught by the association’s nightly safety patrol face warning letters, fines, and can be towed out of their own driveways. Mack agreed to the rules when he moved into the neighborhood in 2019, but hoped a new law would change that.
You can imagine how ecstatic I was when I heard that I could park it in my own house. Meadows residents got this email days before the law went into effect saying, quote, all current parking rules and regulations will remain the same. They got ahead of it and said, no, no, no, no, no, we’re gonna keep everything the same way.
So we ended up with more questions than answers at this point. They’ve also sent out reminders after the law went into effect. Challenge them, people.
HOAs are going to push. You have to push back. The law is there and they’re still going to try to get away with whatever they can.
This is a recent video. That’s a recent story where as soon as the law is passed, people still having to deal with the HOAs trying to infringe on their rights. Now, what can you do about this nonsense? You live in an HOA now or you’re considering buying one in Florida.
I’m gonna give you my best tips to make sure you don’t get squeezed in these situations. Number one on the outset, something I’ve always told my local homeowners buying an HOA. The more money they collect, the higher the monthly dues, the more ability they have to manage you.
Remember, all these people, they’re not really trying to do this for free. So in the history of me selling a lot of real estate, I’ve not seen a lot of really onerous HOAs when there’s not a lot of money collected. Why? They can’t afford all the enforcement options.
They don’t have the money for the stamps and the postage and printing mail and paying someone to stay on top of all that. Number two, stay informed and get involved. That means attend meetings once in a while or attend them regularly if you can.
Review the financial statements. If you see things that are weird, ask questions. Number three, understand your rights.
Now start with two house bills, House Bill 1203 and House Bill 437. Those are two of the most major pieces of legislation passed just for homeowners in Florida. In regards to understanding your rights, also stay on top of reviewing the documents.
Anytime your HOA calls you out and says you violated something, check the rules of your neighborhood to see if it’s actually accurate. Next, leverage the ombudsman. You now have a state officer where you can file complaints and seek mediation for different issues.
If you think there’s some election corruption and chaos in your neighborhood, the ombudsman will be there to check on the voting process and make sure everything is legit. Next, promote and advocate for transparency in your neighborhood. You’re paying them.
Require audits. Require updates. Require transparency and explanations whenever things about the fees don’t make sense or the rules seem murky. If you read these new house bills and you think your neighborhood is in violation, bring it to their attention and maybe it can be straightened out that way. Next, operate from a position of strength by building a coalition.
Most likely, if you have a concern in your neighborhood, many of your neighbors do as well. A united group can be more effective in bringing about change and a board. And if all else fails, consider legal action but if you do this, make sure you search for an attorney who has experience with HOA law and has a track record for dealing with it. So now you know the laws in your favor. There’s more requirements for accountability and transparency in the HOAs here in Florida than ever before.
HOA boards now have to keep in mind that there’s actual criminal penalties for influencing elections, destroying or hiding official records, or receiving kickbacks and things of that nature. So make sure you do your own research to see how the new laws overlay with your current neighborhood’s policies. And as always, if you’re thinking of buying or selling anywhere in the country, within an HOA or not, my team can help you.
Jared Jones is the way to go. Call 706-500. Or reach out to us at info at jaredjones.com. Interesting stuff.
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