The registered agent was a man I’d seen at every annual meeting for the last three years. He wasn’t the president, but he always sat at the end of the table, took notes, and somehow seemed to know which applications were coming in before anyone else did. I pulled the full LLC filings and found all three companies had been created within fourteen months of each other. Different names, different mailing addresses, different mortgages, but the same registered agent and the same sole member. Then I compared the purchase dates with the board minutes. Every one of his nine purchases had been approved within seven days. My first buyer waited thirty-eight days. The second was rejected after the board asked for documents that weren’t required. The third was rejected because the buyer’s financing “created uncertainty.” The fourth was never answered at all. I asked my realtor whether the board had ever given her a reason for the fourth rejection, and she said they’d simply stopped responding. Then she showed me an email she’d received from the board secretary two days after the buyer walked away.
The email said the association was “not comfortable with the direction of the transaction.” There was no explanation beyond that. My lawyer asked for every right-of-first-refusal application from the last three years, including the dates they were received, when they were reviewed, and who voted. The association sent us a spreadsheet. Nine of the approvals had something strange in common: the buyer’s application had been reviewed at a special meeting that wasn’t listed on the public calendar. Each meeting had exactly the same four board members present. The fifth member was absent every time. My lawyer then pulled the deeds for all nine houses and discovered that the purchases weren’t spread randomly through the neighborhood. Eight of the nine properties were directly beside, behind, or across from houses owned by people who had complained about the board. One belonged to the former treasurer who had resigned after questioning the association’s finances. Another belonged to a couple who had challenged a special assessment. Mine was the only one that hadn’t sold yet. Then my realtor found something in the MLS history that made my stomach drop: the board had requested the asking price and seller disclosures from every one of my rejected buyers before rejecting them, and three of those buyers later received private offers from the same LLCs.
I asked the association president whether he knew the man behind the LLCs. He said he knew him “like everyone knows everyone around here.” I asked whether he had ever discussed my property with him. He said no. My lawyer then showed him the board minutes from February, where the president had personally moved to delay my fourth buyer’s application. The president said he’d forgotten about that. Then she showed him the deed records. Nine houses. Three LLCs. One owner. She asked whether the association had any policy preventing board members from participating in decisions involving properties they intended to acquire indirectly. He said there was no conflict because he didn’t own the LLCs. My lawyer asked who did. He wouldn’t answer. So we subpoenaed the LLC formation records and the bank records connected to the purchases. The owner was exactly who we expected. But the payments for all nine houses had come from an account whose authorized signer was not the LLC owner at all — it was the board president, and the first payment on the first house had been made three days after the president voted to reject the seller’s buyer.
