I listed my mother’s condo in March after we moved her into memory care. Our documents say the association has the right to approve buyers, but it’s supposed to be a financial review — credit, income, references, and the ability to meet the association’s obligations. The first buyer was a schoolteacher with an eight-hundred credit score and twenty percent down, and they denied her. The second was a retired couple from Ohio paying cash, and they denied them too. Both times the board president told my realtor the applications were “incomplete” but wouldn’t say what was missing. The third buyer was a young man whose family had come from Somalia in 2004, and his application was denied in eleven days. That’s when my realtor finally said out loud what I hadn’t wanted to believe.
She filed a complaint with HUD in July, and that’s when the association suddenly started producing documents they’d previously claimed didn’t exist. The association’s screening file went to the investigator, and I eventually got a copy myself. Inside was a scoring sheet nobody had ever shown to applicants. It had columns for employment, references, and a third column with no heading at all. Eleven applicants over three years had a mark in that third column, and none of them had ever been approved. I compared the names with the applications we’d submitted, and the pattern was obvious. The mark wasn’t based on income, credit, or references — it was appearing beside applicants who had something in common that wasn’t written anywhere in the official criteria.
The sheet was initialed by the person who scored each application, and all eleven pages had the same two initials. I asked the investigator whether those initials belonged to anyone on the board, and she said they belonged to the board secretary, a retired school administrator who had been handling applicant reviews for years. Then she compared the eleven names against the association’s correspondence and found something even stranger: several of those applicants had been rejected after the secretary personally contacted their references, even though the bylaws never gave her permission to conduct independent screening. And when the investigator asked the secretary why those eleven applicants had been marked differently, she admitted the third column wasn’t about finances at all — it was a private “compatibility” score she’d created herself, based on where applicants had previously lived and whether she believed they would “fit the community.”
