Loudon County seeks change in real estate law » Knoxville News Sentinel
Thanks to Shu Bartholomew for this link. For decades, municipalities have been imposing CIDs on home buyers in order to reap a tax windfall. Now the bill is coming due. Local governments foreclose on home owners for unpaid property taxes, and discover that they have to pony up thousands of dollars in unpaid HOA assessments. So now they want the law to be changed. This would stick the HOAs with the losses, of course.
Legislators representing Loudon County will go back to the drawing board to work on changes in real estate law that could affect the disposition of tax-delinquent properties across the state. The issue in Loudon came to a head last October when 293 tax-delinquent properties in Tellico Village were removed from public auction because the county would have been liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in ongoing property owners association fees. The proposed changes to the law would exempt county governments from paying property owners association assessments after acquiring the properties in tax-delinquency sales. Under current law, counties are responsible for paying such assessments if they acquire the property.
1 comment:
No problem - just make the tax lien have priority over the HOA corporation "lien" as is done elsewhere and the local government is off the hook.
These HOA corporations are private corporations with "liens" of dubious validity. I say that because HOA liens are forward looking, not backward looking. The only other entity that has forward looking liens that can never be paid off are actual government taxing bodies that can impose ad valorem taxes. HOAs corporations, however, are not political subdivisions of the state, were not created legislatively, and should not have "liens" recognized as actual liens.
Nonetheless, the government in Loudon County can simply work towards giving tax liens priority over any other lien - this is done in many states. Indeed a tax lien that is foreclosed upon can divest the first and second purchase money lien holders of their security interest in the property. Why should the HOA corporation be given priority over actual governmental bodies? Answer: it should not. Give the tax liens priority over any other lien and local government's "HOA assessments" problem is resolved.
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