I think what GP is saying is that if I was a homeowner for 30 years, paid HOA fees all those years, then last year sold to someone else, who gets the HOA reimbursement then? I paid thousands over years and would presumably get nothing, while some other guy who just moved in all of a sudden gets a big check? That seems unfair.
I would assume the sale price of your property would be higher if it's part of a well managed HOA with 500k in reserves than if it's part of a dysfunctional, insolvent HOA, so the previous property owner kinda already got paid out for their contributions.
It's like selling shares of a company with significant cash reserves before/after they choose to liquidate a chunk of them into dividends or stock buy-backs, I would hope you priced the shares accordingly and have nothing to be mad about.
Where I'm from we call a HOA a body corporate, and every home owner in the scheme has a % ownership in the BC. The title deed includes the ownership share. So if the house ownership is transferred, so is the share in the BC.
Size of the share is determined usually by the dwelling floor area divided by the sum total of all dwellings in the scheme.
So if you sell your house after decades of contributions, and then the BC is dissolved, then too bad, you sold your share in a going concern and lost your say in it's affairs.
Arguably you benefitted from the contributions from someone who came before you, and now someone will benefit from yours.
Hoa funds practically never get redistributed back to owners. I've never heard of such a case. We are only talking about it here because a legislature is talking about changing something state wide (and realistically this won't happen anyways).
So there is no realistic scenario where hoa reserves factor into home price
Reserves are money available for HOA expenses which would otherwise require new money from the owners. For that to factor into home prices, you just need buyers and sellers to be aware of this and what it means for their wallet in the future. Which may not be the norm since people are often clueless, but it doesn't seem completely absurd.
What you are saying is not typically in HOA governing documents nor State law so law would have to be changed and / or governing docs updated which would take a majority vote by all homeowners (60% in some cases per State law)
Imagine you dissolve a company that has a lot of money in the bank. What do you do with that money? Distributing it to the shareholders seems like the right way to dispose of it. What if somebody sold all their shares a day before? Well, they get nothing, that's how it works. The company's money should be accounted for in the share price, so it all works out, there's nothing unfair.
An HOA is no different. All the owners are also owners of the HOA. When you buy a place in the HOA you also buy into the HOA, and when you sell you also sell your interest in the HOA.
