Mesa Verde

Deed Restrictions: Why they are Important!

Ever wonder why you have a homeowners association? Your community HOA is YOUR best defense in protecting the value of your home and the quality of YOUR neighborhood.

Community associations do many things such as setting and collecting the maintenance fees required and needed to run an association, maintaining landscaping or recreation centers, and providing for events or meeting places for neighborhood functions. So with this said, one of the most important functions of an association is to enforce deed restrictions and protect the value of the community assets and your home.

Enforcing deed restrictions is time consuming but very important. The Association Times website gave the following information regarding the enforcement of deed restrictions.
“If deed restriction violations are not corrected, there can be very negative results over time. Estimates are that property values in a subdivision with an inactive association can fall as much as twenty percent due to failure to enforce restrictions. To illustrate, multiply an average home price of $200,000.00 times the number of lots in an average subdivision of 100 homes. This yields total property value of $20,000,000.00. This is the value of the assets that the association is trying to protect. If that property value is reduced by twenty percent, the homeowners in the neighborhood collectively lose $4,000,000.00.

Even if home prices only lose ten percent in value due to a moderate failure to enforce deed restrictions, homeowners lose $2,000,000.00. The association, acting through its board of directors, can control the appearance of the neighborhood by taking deed restrictions seriously and by vigorously enforcing any significant infraction of those restrictions”.

Deed restrictions are legally binding covenants, filed with real property records, which provide for building, maintaining, and using the homes in your neighborhood. The deed restrictions control how homes look and what can be done to alter them within the subdivision. Many prospective homebuyers will consider the neighborhood’s appearance in addition to the home they are considering and at is why it is so important to abide by the deed restrictions.

So with all that said….What does it take to make Mesa Verde beautiful? First of all it takes an active Board of Directors and willing committee members to help enforce the deed restrictions. The appearance of a development can steadily decline if the board members do not discuss and establish uniform standards for everyone. To have a beautiful community it also takes the pride of the residents to ensure the neighborhood will become an architectural showcase for sustained property values.

Without the deed restrictions some people would leave garbage in their yards permanently, never maintain their homes, park their cars and boats on the grass in their front yards, park motor homes in the street for years, leave construction unfinished, and make every kind of bizarre, structurally unsound remodeling project you can imagine. You are probably laughing right this minute but these are the types of issues I deal with on a daily basis as a member of the Board of Directors for the Mesa Verde HOA.
So, the next time you ask yourself what is the purpose of a deed restricted community…take a drive around some of the other areas of San Antonio and be glad you live in our community.