HOA Foreclosures Are Up 40 Percent.

“Homeowner associations can fine residents, bar them from voting and, in some cases, foreclose on their homes. Yet many still cannot show residents how their own elections were counted.”

As HOA foreclosure filings rise, the question of who verified those boards has become urgent. Jonathan Gropper built TrueHOA to make homeowner- association elections provable. Picture the annual meeting. There are folding chairs in the clubhouse and a cardboard box of envelopes on a table. Someone counts the ballots and announces a number. Everyone claps or does not, and the neighbors go home. One owner drives home wondering whether her ballot was in that box. There is no way for her to find out. If she asks the board later, it may not know either.

This is a much bigger system than most people realize. More than 77 million Americans live under homeowner associations. There are around 370,000 of them, governing more than $13 trillion in property. An HOA collects your money, sets rules you have to follow and, in the worst case, can foreclose on your home. It is the smallest government most Americans will ever live under and the one with the most direct power over their daily lives.

As HOA expenses increase, that power is being used. More than 6,300 properties drew HOA related foreclosure filings in the first quarter of 2026, a nearly 40 percent jump from two years earlier, according to ATTOM data reported by The Wall Street Journal. HOA foreclosures are now rising faster than mortgage foreclosures.

In Florida, for example, if you fall more than 90 days behind on what the association says you owe, you lose your right to vote. Many associations elsewhere write the same rule into their governing documents. The government taking the house gets to disqualify the voter first, based on a ledger nobody audits. Its elections still run on the honor system.

Jonathan Gropper’s career, viewed backward, looks like preparation for noticing this. He studied computer science, business and applied mathematics before law school, which tells you something about how his mind works. He has always been interested in the rules and the machinery underneath them.

Then came the startups. OnlyOpenHouses.com addressed a wonderfully ordinary problem by helping people find open houses in real time. BeerRightNow.com addressed another by delivering something when a customer actually wanted it. They were different businesses, but the instinct was the same. Gropper would find something people had accepted as unnecessarily difficult and ask why it still worked that way.

That question carried him through the United States, Europe and Asia, through real estate and emerging technology, and eventually into blockchain and artificial intelligence. Blockchain gets explained badly and VERY often. Its most useful idea is STILL quite human. If something important happened, there should be a record of it that nobody can quietly change later.

Gropper became preoccupied with that idea and it shaped his academic and policy work and led to his selection as a Fulbright Specialist for the United States Department of State. His work focused on governance and artificial intelligence, and he advised governments and institutions as they adapted to new technology.

A Problem Close to Home

Then the work came home, quite literally.

Gropper has lived under association governance as a homeowner. He has also served on boards and as a board president. In something as ordinary as a community election, he found every question he had been asking on a much larger scale. Who has a voice? Who decides? Who checks the people making the decisions? When two sides disagree about what happened, who can prove anything?

The situation that convinced him was not dramatic. A homeowner believes her vote was not counted. The board says it was. Both may be telling the truth, but neither can prove it. Most HOA elections still run on paper ballots, proxies, email chains, spreadsheets and unverified electronic voting. They are administered by volunteers and overworked managers who, in the vast majority of cases, are doing what they are supposed to do.

That is what makes the situation so corrosive. An honest board and a dishonest board stand on identical footing. Both can only ask the community to trust them. A question becomes an accusation. The accusation becomes a fight over records. The records fight becomes litigation funded with the community’s own money.

TrueHOA’s research puts the national cost of association disputes at between $5 billion and $10 billion a year, with a single contested election averaging $186,000. The estimates are the company’s own, but the bills in these fights do not disappear into theory. The owners pay them. Gropper’s conclusion was that bad people were not the whole problem. The absence of proof was.

The industry’s answer to the paper mess has been electronic voting, and dozens of platforms sell it. To be fair, electronic voting fixed real things. Voting from a phone is easier than dealing with a double envelope. Automatic tallies are better than a hand count at 10 at night. Reaching quorum gets easier.

Follow the Ballot

The more important question is what happens to the ballot. It goes into the vendor’s database. The count happens on the vendor’s servers, somewhere the community cannot see, and the result is whatever the software reports and the board approves. If an owner disputes the outcome, the answer is still an assurance from the board or the company that ran the election.

The community has stopped taking the manager’s word and started taking a software company’s word. The election may still have been set up by the manager without the community seeing how. Trust has simply moved to a different place. The proof is still missing and that is key.

Gropper compares it to a contractor writing his own inspection report. An electronic voting company is being asked to certify the election it conducted. This is the distinction TrueHOA was built around. It can sound like marketing until you follow what happens to the record. Other systems digitized the ballot. Meanwhile, Gropper wanted to change where the record lived and who had control over it, including his own company.

On TrueHOA, each ballot and tally is sealed into a unique verification record anchored to a public blockchain ledger outside the company’s own system. The board, the manager or TrueHOA cannot rewrite it. The ballots remain a secret. The community can see who voted, but no one can see how an individual member voted. The tally and its record can be reviewed independently. Anyone examining the same record should be able to perform the same check and reach the same result.

If someone challenges the election, the board does not have to argue that it behaved honestly. It can show exactly what happened.

A convenient election and a provable election are completely different products. For decades, nobody was really selling the second. HOA conversations turn into opposing camps remarkably fast. Residents blame the boards. Meanwhile, boards blame the management. On the other hand, Homeowners blame the HOA. But the HOA is often the person next door, a volunteer giving up evenings to deal with budgets, roof bids, insurance and complaints.

Gropper insists that the point was never to arm owners against boards. An owner should be able to ask a question, and the board should be able to answer with evidence. A manager should not have to become a forensic investigator every time an election is challenged.

Proof protects good boards from the suspicion created by bad ones. Nobody gets more power and nobody must remain powerless. There is a harder economic edge to this, and Gropper does not soften it. He calls HOA fees a “hidden tax on American housing.”

Communities need the money for roofs, insurance, elevators and reserves. But the sums are enormous and mostly unexamined. His team’s analysis, covered this summer by The Business Journals, found that every $100 a month in HOA fees translates into roughly $20,000 of home price a buyer effectively gives up.

For one homeowner, an extra $200 a month is an annoyance. For a family trying to qualify for a mortgage, it is a lost bedroom of purchasing power. For a retiree on a fixed income, a surprise special assessment can decide whether she keeps her home.

When the stakes are that high, transparency stops being a software feature. It then becomes part of housing security. People being asked to pay more deserve to see why. They also deserve proof of the election that seated the people making the decision.

Gropper’s ambition goes beyond selling subscriptions. He wants governance to join the list of things buyers check. He wants buyers to ask how the community is governed and whether it can prove it.

Once buyers start asking, the transparency of a well run community becomes worth something. A board that can prove how it was elected, how decisions were made and where the money went has an advantage over one whose answer is still a request for trust. The latter begins to look less like tradition and more like deferred maintenance.

He is trying to create that expectation deliberately. TrueHOA’s Verified Governance Specialist certification is free to homeowners, board members, managers and real estate professionals because a standard only becomes a standard when people begin to expect it. A platform can build the tool. A community decides what it demands from the people who govern it.

This brings the law degree, the startups, the Fulbright work and the blockchain years back to the most ordinary place imaginable. It is a community room with folding chairs, a box on a table and neighbors deciding the future of their own small government.

The count is announced. People gather their bags and go home. This time, the owner wondering about her ballot can check.

“Great communities are not built on trust alone,” Gropper says. “They are built on proof.”