My attorney said, "Your developer built on land they didn't own."
And that is when it got nasty. The HOA president emailed me directly, mistake number one, saying that I was a squatter and that I did not deserve to block progress. He said that they would take care of me if I would agree to a fair price. The number they offered was less than my purchase price years ago, not less market value, less what I actually paid back then. I forwarded the email to my attorney and he said not to respond.
A week later, a certified letter arrived from the HOA's law firm accusing me of slander for telling people in the neighborhood that they had built on my land. I actually had not told anyone anything. I had not even posted on Facebook. They were bluffing and fishing for a response. We ignored it and filed our service of process, which is the legal way to say you've officially been sued. They were served at a board meeting. I'm told it was awkward.
The developer finally showed up in the mix at that point. They had been operating through shell entities with names like HOA Development LLC and HOA Builders LLC. By the way, I anonymized those names for privacy with addresses that were basically P.O. boxes. They hired a big regional firm and came in hot. They claimed their survey overlay correctly. They claimed adverse possession, which is hilarious because trust me, you don't get to adverse possess a platted piece of land with recorded taxes and a current owner who lives overseas for work and pays every bill on time. They claimed good faith. To claim good faith, they would have to show that they reasonably believed they owned the land. That is tough though when my deed predates their purchase and they had notice the entire time that it existed in public records.
The county got dragged in as a third party for approving the plat. That is standard. The HOA tried to distance itself, saying they only manage common areas. That would have been cute if they hadn't recorded CC&Rs, conditions, covenants, and restrictions. They literally described boundary lines, including my rectangle, and if they hadn't collected dues from people living in these houses on my land. At one point, someone suggested that I could just join the HOA. I laughed out loud. Hard pass.
Let me pause here to say though, I know this sounds like I'm made of money to be doing all this. I am not. Legal fees are expensive and the stress is not free. But title insurance exists for a reason. And my policy covered legal defense to protect my title. That was a lifesaver. Also, we were not doing this on vibes. We had actual recorded documents and a surveyor who staked the original corners when I bought. That surveyor came out again with his tripod and his fancy GPS stick and confirmed everything to the inch. He put new pink tape on the stakes. He took photos and wrote an affidavit. Then, like a cherry on top, we found the iron pin at the northwest corner, exactly where my deed said it would be, buried under 3 inches of dirt and some mulch that a landscaper had kindly spread to make a model home look nice. I could have cried.
We went to the first hearing on the motion for a temporary injunction. The courtroom had that hushed vibe like a library that's about to kick you out. My attorney was calm, though. The judge was one of those people who radiates, "I've seen shenanigans worse than this" energy. The developer's attorney blustered about jobs and progress, and the HOA attorney tried to paint me as an opportunist trying to leverage a mistake for profit.
My attorney said a single sentence that shifted the room. "Your honor, we are not here to extort anybody. We are here to assert the property right recorded years before any of this. These houses are trespasses."
The judge asked a lot of questions. He asked the developer why they didn't get a boundary line agreement signed when their survey didn't match the prior records and they danced around it. He asked HOA if they had title to any of the land in question and they said no. He asked the county if the plat approval included a field check. The county attorney said it didn't. It's an administrative review for form not substance.
The judge set a schedule, told everyone to keep their tempers, and said that he would take the temporary injunction under advisement. He also warned the developer that continued construction on disputed parcels could result in sanctions if they ultimately lost.
They kept building though, not on the two disputed half lots that overlap the worst, but on everything else like they could outpace the lawsuit. They rushed to get closings done and on the four finished houses for which we had recorded the lis pendens. Title companies bless them are not suicidal though. Those closings did not happen. Buyers got itchy. The model home sales agents started getting passive aggressive, telling prospective buyers that one disgruntled person was holding up the neighborhood. I know this because one of the buyers reached out to me through my attorney and said he didn't want to buy anything that might get bulldozed. He had seen the notice recorded and went down the rabbit hole. People think I had a vendetta against the families. I actually didn't. My beef was with the people who put a street on top of my deed and then tried to bully me into selling it back at a discount.
The hearing on the merits came a bit later and by then something else had happened that put gasoline on the fire. One of the finished houses had actually closed. I found out because a new deed popped up in the recorder's index transferring title from HOA Builder LLC to a Family Trust. The title company had insured over the lis pendens because they chose to tie the legal description to the HOA's plat number, not my meets and bounds, and they took the position that the lis pendens didn't specifically describe the lot in question. It was a messy, risky choice. They basically bet on the developer winning.