I would never buy a SFR in a place with an HOA. Aside from someone else telling you how to decorate your landscape and outside walls, where you park your car, and so on, you have someone else controlling money you put into a fund and making decisions on how to spend your money. You can expect a lifetime of HOA dues increases, and on top of that you might expect “special assessments” in which they require each owner to put in thousands of dollars for “special” projects (building a playground for little Jimmy next door, fixing the sidewalk that little Jimmy later drove his monster truck onto, putting in a stop sign because little Jimmy killed some pedestrians there, painting the clubhouse that little Jimmy’s friends sprayed graffiti on, whatever).
The management of your HOA is completely unregulated, undemocratic, and allows for rampant waste and poor management, even if the board members live in the complex. It sounds like another conspiracy theory but when you take normal people and put them in control of funds from a large group of people (in my complex the reserve is in the millions) then strange things occur.
Please read the section called “Lack of Checks and Balances” in wikipedia’s page on homo-asses. In fact, read the whole page, it’s a great and unbiased viewpoint on HOAs with all the pros and cons.
