HOAs. Nobody likes 'em. They're annoying. Sometimes they make you just wanna tear up your yard and make your house ugly, just to spite them.
Other times you go the more ... shall we say, sophisticated route.
This fellow said he began receiving "unsubstantiated [homeowner] violations, as in, my property is immaculate and there was absolutely no reason to be receiving these things." He suspected he was being targeted by a spiteful Karen, so he set out to prove it.
The homeowner association's management company was not making things easy, so the family began "inundating them with long winded emails with wording such that we are documenting this process and it shall be recorded that no response confirms X," though the homeowners were still "asking for a reasonable and amicable resolution."
Then the homeowners "put in a public records request for all violation notices issued to the community for the past year," and apparently that just made the HOA mad:
In an attempt to overwhelm me, the HO attorneys deployed the classic legal strategy of sending literally all records for all time, as thousands of PDFs, nested into inconsistent directories, with about 30% duplicates.
Lawyers dropping those docs off like:
The homeowner's response?
I lol'd, no big deal.
Now things are getting interesting!
We wrote a script to gather the documents and convert the PDFs to text and remove duplicates. With the cleaned txt files, we wrote another script to concurrently call the gpt-40 API using openai function calling to extract consistent data from them in JSON. That cost was $9 in API fees and only took a few minutes of time.
Using the scrubbed dataset, the homeowners "ran analysis to find enforcement anomalies," then they "took the data subset and dumped it into a Google map" to find evidence of "targeted and selective enforcement."
(That's what good technology is supposed to do, folks โ make it easier to do righteous work like this!)
The homeowners did not reveal this right away, but "held those cards close to the chest" as they "closed in on who was responsible for the issuance of the fake violations."
They identified a board member as the culprit; they then quickly orchestrated a bait in the hopes of convincing that board member to drive by the house and "perform an unwarranted inspection."
Spoiler: It worked!
I had just finished upgrading my security cameras to 4k with views up and down both sides of the street when they took the bait! HOA Karen just couldn't help herself. Now we have video evidence of the HO president driving out her way, stopping at my house to take pictures, and then speeding off without stopping anywhere else. Targeted harassment.
The homeowners "then engaged the HOs law firm with a demand letter, and based on all the evidence I'm confident that we got 'em!"
I'd sure say you did, buddy! Bravo!
P.S. Now check out our latest video ๐