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When Caila Schwartz bought her home in the Carolina Park neighborhood of Mount Pleasant in 2017, her homeowners association fees were approximately $860 a year. Since then, annual increases have been routine — to the point where her 2025 HOA fees will be $1,255, she said, 46 percent higher than when she originally bought the house eight years ago.

She’s hardly alone. There are approximately 75 million U.S. residents living in neighborhoods governed by an HOA or community association, including 1.4 million in South Carolina. And in many cases those fees are rising faster than inflation, putting a further financial squeeze on homeowners or prospective home buyers who are already dealing with increasing insurance costs and elevated mortgage rates.

Schwartz is among the fortunate ones — she’s been able to afford the increases, which she said are going up in 2025 due to increased costs for maintenance and insurance, and help pay for amenities that include two swimming pools and tennis and pickleball courts. “Overall, we feel like the value for the money has been great,” she said. “The common areas are clean and well-maintained, and the community features are well worth the fee for the value we get out of them every year.”

But not everyone is that content. A 2024 survey by Rocket Mortgage found that 57 percent of residents in HOA communities didn’t like having a homeowners association, with rising fees cited as a primary complaint. The average monthly HOA fee nationwide is $259, according to the Foundation for Community Association Research, part of the Community Associations Institute, an industry advocacy organization. South Carolina’s average monthly fee of $390 (which equates to $4,676 annually) is tied for 16th-highest in the nation, led by Missouri at $469.

But HOA fees can vary wildly based on location and property type, even within the Palmetto State. They tend to be higher for townhome and condominium complexes, where community associations can also oversee shared exterior infrastructure like roofs and walls that can be very expensive to maintain and repair. Schwartz knows that firsthand, too — she also owns a condo in Mount Pleasant, whose monthly HOA fees have increased 70 percent in four years, from $350 to nearly $600.

Proponents say that HOAs — composed of the neighborhood boards that make the decisions, and the management companies typically hired to enforce them — protect property values and cover the cost of common areas and neighborhood amenities. Homes in community associations are generally valued at least 4 percent more than other homes, according to the Community Associations Institute.

“We get a really bad rap. Nobody likes an HOA. Nobody. I even live in (an HOA community), and I hate it, as a matter of fact,” said Darla Benoit, director of community association management in the Myrtle Beach office of Real Manage, a national community management company. 

“But I understand completely the value of living in an HOA. I mean, you can drive down the streets of a community that doesn't have an HOA, and you can clearly see the value in that their property looks neglected. There's nobody there to tell them that you need to pressure wash your driveway or your house, or pick up the trash. There's nobody there to tell them to do those things, so they don't.”

While South Carolina passed a Homeowners Association Act in 2018, it deals largely with proper documentation and transparency. And while the S.C. Department of Consumer Affairs does provide an avenue for those seeking to file written complaints against an HOA or management company, community associations in South Carolina are largely governed only by the text of their own covenants and restrictions — which give residents of HOA communities few safeguards against rising fees.

“Insurance costs are significant, and those are definitely playing a part in increasing HOA fees,” said Kathleen McDaniel, a partner at the Columbia law firm Burnette Shutt & McDaniel, who specializes in cases involving HOAs. “And for townhomes built 30 or 40 years ago, the maintenance costs are skyrocketing. So, there's a lot of tension between how much an HOA can charge, what are the rules for how they can increase it, and what can the people who live there actually afford to pay?”

‘A free market system’

How powerful are homeowners associations in South Carolina? In extreme cases, they can foreclose on homes to collect delinquent fines and fees. That’s exactly what happened to Devery and Tina Hale of Irmo in 2014, when their $128,000 home in the Winrose neighborhood was sold at auction for $3,000 —over $250 in unpaid fees.

There’s also nothing in the law that limits how often HOA fees can be raised, and how high they can go, confirmed Carri Grube Lybarker, administrator of the S.C. Department of Consumer Affairs. “It would be whatever is in their master deed and whatever is in their bylaws for as far as how those can be adjusted and changed,” she said.

Indeed, South Carolina does not have a comprehensive law detailing how a homeowners association must operate. The Homeowners Association Act requires only that HOAs provide homeowners with at least 48 hours’ notice of any meeting in which a decision to raise annual budgets are made. HOAs that are nonprofits also fall under the S.C. Nonprofit Act, which details how boards and bylaws can be set up, and how much notice (at least 10 days) members must have of meetings.

Florida and North Carolina have stronger HOA laws than South Carolina, Lybarker said, “but our legislature has just not determined to put something similar to those, or anything that has more than what we have currently.” She added: “The state as a whole, no matter what area that you're looking into, is a very free market kind of system. There are free market beliefs in our state legislature, and that’s evident in the laws that we have.”

Added Benoit, the property manager: “We do have to follow the governing documents of the association. … Those are our laws that we have to abide by. But there are no other specifics in the state of South Carolina.”

The HOA law dictates that sellers must let buyers know if the property is governed by a homeowners’ association, which is handled through the disclosure form that sellers fill out before they put their home on the market. And homeowners must have access to HOA documents, which are typically available through an association’s website. But beyond that, the state largely views HOAs as private agreements and stays out of the way.

“The government tries very hard not to get involved in enforcement or interpretations of private contracts,” said McDaniel. “It's just like the contract to sell a car. When you have a contract to sell a car and you think someone has not disclosed something or they have misled you about the vehicle, typically your recourse is to sue them in court. There are some agencies that you can report it to, but it's not something where the government comes in and takes over enforcement for you.”

The governing documents of some HOAs, Benoit said, only allow fees to be increased by a certain amount each year. “There’s nothing in state law that says anything about what you can and can’t do as far as that goes,” she added. Other community associations may have rules that any fee increase over a certain amount has to go to a vote of the membership—meaning all individual homeowners. But it’s also possible for boards to raise fees to just below that threshold, McDaniel added, circumventing a vote of the full membership.

Fee hikes at condo and townhome complexes are often due to increased insurance costs, Benoit said. In single-family neighborhoods, those fees also cover the costs of maintaining common areas and amenity centers. “Did the electric bill at your house go up? I'm sure it did,” she added. “I know in this town, Santee Cooper electric went up 8 percent. That means it went up 8 percent for the common areas, too. We have to cover those expenses, and it's got to come from somewhere. You have to pay all those increases. It's not going to come from anywhere else.”

‘It’s not going to resolve anything’

The HOA complaint database available through the S.C. Department of Consumer Affairs contains over 1,000 entries, and they run the gamut. A resident of Brookstone Meadows in Anderson complained that a tree in the neighborhood was removed without notification. Another in the Bradford Village community in Santee complained that HOA assessments were increasing while available amenities were decreasing. At the Spinnaker Cove condos in Myrtle Beach, a resident clamored for the HOA to repair porch railings.

SCDCA is mandated by state law to take consumer complaints against HOAs and present an annual report to the governor and the General Assembly. During 2023 (the most recent year for which data was available), there were 365 complaints filed against 298 HOAs or management companies, a 32 percent increase from 2022. The top type of issue raised was a failure to enforce covenants or bylaws (15.7 percent). Nearly a quarter of all complaints (24.4 percent) came from Horry County.

Once a complaint is filed, SCDCA uses a voluntary mediation process to try and settle the matter — and indeed, many disputes in the complaint database are marked as “satisfied.” But state law does not allow the agency to force a HOA or homeowner to participate in the complaint process, require a specific outcome, or attempt to arbitrate the dispute, according to the agency.

“If you make a complaint to the Department of Consumer Affairs, they will take a look at the complaint, relay it to the board, ask the board if they have a response, and if there is a possibility (to) help negotiate some sort of reconciliation,” McDaniel said. “But boards know that the Department of Consumer Affairs doesn't really have any power over them other than gentle persuasion, so it's rare that things actually get worked out at that level.”

If a resident in one of the communities Benoit manages had an issue with the HOA, would she recommend they file a complaint with SCDCA? “Of course not,” she said. “I don't want a complaint going to the Consumer Affairs Commission about our company, or any other company. I mean, there's nothing that is going to do for that person. I mean, what is that? How does that resolve what their issue is? That's not going to resolve anything.”

Any real change would have to come through the state legislature, and toward that end some lawmakers have tried. Sen. Darrell Jackson (D-Columbia) introduced a bill in February of 2024 that would have made it illegal for an HOA to auction off a primary residence over unpaid fines or fees, but it died in committee. In December, Rep. Val Guest (R-Myrtle Beach) pre-filed a bill that would create an “internal dispute resolution process” for HOA issues, allowing magistrates to hear them regardless of the monetary value involved. Currently, magistrates can hear only matters that deal with values of $7,500 or less.

“We always tell folks when they're filing a complaint against a business, just generally, to try and get that resolved within the business itself,” Lybarker said. “So, a framework for that within a homeowners association, we think, could help alleviate the need or the desire for folks to have to file with us.”

But no recent legislation has targeted escalation of HOA fees, which in South Carolina remain largely unchecked — outside of what the bylaws of individual associations dictate. That ultimately puts the onus on homeowners to be aware of neighborhood bylaws, and know what HOA boards can and cannot do.

“The homeowner just has to do their due diligence,” Benoit said. “Most management companies have portals now, websites that owners can go to and access their minutes. Some governing documents say all board meetings are open, some don't — that's up to the individual association. Most homeowners, if they ask the questions, we'll be happy to tell them the answers. Most of the time, they just don't like the answers that we give them.”