An Owners' Question

The most common objection to ending an HOA is "but my home value." It is an objection worth taking seriously and answering with evidence rather than reassurance. The academic literature has spent thirty years on this question. Here is what it actually says.

The conventional wisdom comes mostly from a different kind of HOA.

The widely-cited finding, that HOAs add roughly 4 to 5 percent to home values, comes mostly from studies of communities with substantial amenities: pools, clubhouses, gated entries, private roads, on-site security. Where the price premium has been measured, it lives in the amenities, not in the association itself. None of those amenities describe Patriots Choice.

The age-decay effect is documented even by the HOA industry's own research.

A 2015 literature review prepared for the Community Associations Institute by Virginia Tech (Hopkins, 2015), funded by the HOA industry, so as friendly a source as exists, acknowledges that the HOA price premium decreases by roughly 0.4 percentage points per year. A 10-year-old deed-restricted neighborhood showed a 6 percent premium; a 20-year-old neighborhood showed 2 percent. By years 25 through 27, restrictive covenants had a negative effect on property values (Rogers, 2010, cited in Hopkins).

Excessive restrictions can flip the sign entirely.

The same Hopkins paper, citing Dehring and Lind (2007), notes that when private covenant regulations layer on top of public zoning to become excessive, the result can erase any positive value impact, or produce a negative one. A Board with broad architectural pre-approval authority, inspection rights, lien-and-foreclosure power for unpaid assessments, and now a per-violation fines schedule sits in exactly the zone the research warns about.

Independent researchers find a more critical picture than industry-funded ones.

A 2019 study by Leon Robertson, a retired Yale researcher, examined 900 home sales across three counties in different states. He found that homes outside HOAs appreciated at a measurably higher rate than homes inside HOA-governed communities, and that's before netting out the assessments HOA homeowners paid over the same period. Even within the industry-friendly research summarized in the Hopkins paper, 45 percent of the studies reviewed did not find a positive HOA effect on values.

One important nuance most owners haven't considered.

A common worry: "without rules, what stops my neighbor from painting their house pink?" The answer is more flexible than people assume. Dissolving the Association does not extinguish the underlying restrictive covenants. Section 8.3 of our Declaration states that the uses, restrictions and architectural standards in Article VIII survive termination of the planned community and run with the land. They are recorded against every lot, not held by the Association entity. What ends is the enforcement bureaucracy: the dues, the assessments, the Board's enforcement authority, and the fines.

This matters because a serious property-value concern does not have to be a vote against change. The architectural standards, the lawn-care expectations, and the prohibitions on commercial use stay on the books either way, enforceable by neighbors through private action.

What this means in practice.

If you've been told that ending the HOA will hurt your home value, the honest answer is: it depends on which HOA, how old, with what amenities, and on the structure of the termination agreement. For an amenity-light association two decades old that has just announced a fines schedule, the research strongly suggests the value-protective case for continuing as-is is weak. We are happy to share the underlying studies with any owner who wants to read them. The case made on this site is meant to be checked, not believed.