Renting in an HOA as a homeowner
If you are a homeowner, you want to first and foremost make sure you check your community’s governing documents and bylaws to make sure you can even rent your home out and what stipulations you could face for renting. If you are new to homeowning, your HOA governing documents and bylaws are given to you upon closing. It’s important to understand as a homeowner, just because you are renting out your property doesn’t make your property exempt from following the rules. Which means you are still responsible for your renter.
What should you know as a renter?
There’s a lot to understand about renting in an HOA community. Like we mentioned above, you must know what you can and can’t do in your community, and that’s through reading the governing documents and bylaws for yourself. Your landlord should provide these. These legal documents will help ensure as a renter that you are complying with the HOA association’s regulations.
What do you need to know?
One document you should familiarize yourself with is the Architectural Guidelines. This particular document will go over things like where you can store your garbage cans. Or how long they can be kept out front on garbage day. You should know other things: what type of flag you can fly from your home. If you own pets, your will want to know where they can play at. Understanding the rules on how the HOA community expects you to take care of things like pet waste. Even things like what type of car maintenance, if any, can be done in the driveway or in front of your home. You need to understand what kind of yard maintenance you will be expected to handle.
The Architectural Guidelines is also where they explain how to apply for any changes. Being a renter, any changes you wish to make that need approval by the HOA need to be applied for by the homeowner, or the property manager. Most HOA’s require them to apply. We highly recommend contacting your landlord or a property manager with any questions you might have for changes or aesthetic upgrades. Before you do anything, ask before you make them.
Amenities, Can you use them?
You need to understand if your community has amenities such as a pool or gym. Understand how you can take advantage of using them, and what you could do to lose the opportunity to use those amenities. Many HOA communities require you to be fully current on HOA dues to use amenities. So make sure you understand how these HOA fees are collected. Most renters pay this fee through their rent payment. But it’s an important question to ask and know the answer to.
Understand your rights as a renter, and know what you are getting into when renting your new home. Here are several other helpful things as tenants you might find useful when renting from us here at RentWise Property Management. If you have any questions, we would love to hear from you; feel free to E-Mail us.