@Daley - Luckily most of the units I've looked at are in HOA-free areas. I have sworn that I will NEVER live somewhere with a HOA. :-) The housing market is kind of slow in my area right now so I may wait until it picks up before I get financing set up because I really only found one house I'd be willing to move into in the last several months of searching, and it ended up being a dud. I expect the market will turn eventually.
Trust me, I dislike traditional suburban HOAs as well. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and emotional scars to prove it and won't go back. However, HOAs/Co-Ops with multi-unit housing for purchase is a whole other beast, and isn't so much about collecting fees to play angry front lawn dictator so much as pay for insurance and property maintenance on the outer building. Many duplexes/triplexes only describe ownership of the property in question as starting and stopping at the inner walls of the dwelling (even if they potentially "give" you a yard to maintain), and I'll use a simple graphic to show why that I'm sure you'll appreciate from a legal perspective.
This stupid little ASCII doodle is a triplex, and the asterisk indicates a hole in the roof above unit 2. There is only water damage inside units 1 and 3 due to roof pitch, however.
.--*--.
/ \
|1|2|3|Unless the outer building is owned and paid for as commons by all three units with enough insurance and liquid assets to get the hole fixed, who pays for repairs to stop the damage?
This is where we were thankful that we actually had gone FHA with our home loan. The unit we were looking at didn't advertise an HOA, and no dues were being collected or in the coffers. The HOA had lapsed for over five years, and there was literally no insurance on the commons. Thankfully, FHA put the brakes on it. At the time, we didn't know any better, but once the reality was explained to us, it made perfect sense. Worse, one of the finance people in the seller's RE office suggested going through them for the loan "given our troubles", and said, "don't worry, we can get the loan pushed through, our lenders don't care as we were able to secure loans for the others living there!"
I recoiled at that idea, horrified. Nightmare scenarios going through my head with roof damage, fires, etc., insurance claim nightmares, and zero active HOA for the property with no dues collected for years, and nothing but other owners who hadn't lived there long enough to know an HOA was supposed to be in place and likely would have balked at suddenly having an extra $250/month tacked onto their monthly costs to get the commons properly covered... and yes, the roof was getting old and showed some hail damage. (We liked the place so much at the time, we considered what it would take to re-establish the HOA and what the ongoing costs would be, but the cost placed the total higher than our budget, and I really didn't want to become the hostile neighbor that forced the people who he shared a wall with to suddenly have a $250+ added expense tacked onto their monthly costs.) It was also with that encounter that I discovered that some home lenders don't actually give a toss about their own borrower's best interests and financial security. It really is buyer beware.
It was with that almost mistake that I learned to appreciate both FHA loans and HOAs under certain conditions. We were naïve going into that, and FHA saved our bacon. I also realized that unless I owned the entire building, I'd actually feel more comfortable buying any sort of multi-unit housing with some sort of HOA in place to act as mediator and commons keeper.
