Dana told me the account had been created in 2017, which was the same year the previous family bought my house. I asked her whether the account had ever been used against anyone else, and she said no — every single complaint had been about that property. There were nineteen complaints in the year before they moved, then the account went quiet, and after I bought the house it suddenly became active again. I asked her whether the previous owners had ever complained about the house themselves, and she said the records didn’t look like ordinary homeowner complaints because most of them were submitted within minutes of each other and described things that would have required someone to be watching the property closely.
I pulled the deed history and found the family had sold the house in 2019, but the complaint account remained active for years afterward. The strangest part was that the complaints started again only three weeks after I moved in, and they became more frequent whenever I made changes to the property. Dana checked the portal’s remaining access records and found that someone had logged into the account long after the previous owners had moved to Tennessee. I asked whether she could see where those logins came from, and she said most of the older information had been deleted, but one record from 2023 was still available. The login didn’t come from Tennessee or anywhere near my neighborhood.
It came from the management company’s own office, using a computer assigned to an employee who reviewed resident complaints before they were sent to the board. I asked Dana why an employee would be using a homeowner’s account, and she said she couldn’t explain it, but she could see that the account had been accessed several times before complaints were submitted. Then she opened the oldest complaint still attached to the account and noticed something I’d never considered. The complaint had been filed in 2019, before the previous owners sold the house — but the person who submitted it wasn’t the owner, and the account had been created using an email address belonging to the management company’s former compliance manager.
