In my state you don't sign the hoa (covenants). Instead it is just something a dead guy signed 40 years ago, encumbered on the land for infinity*, and recorded

In my state you don't sign the hoa (covenants). Instead it is just something a dead guy signed 40 years ago, encumbered on the land for infinity*, and recorded somewhere. Maybe the title search will turn it up, maybe it won't, but either way it is enforced whether you know (or even could know) about it or not. I was particularly enraged that even in unpopulated desert wasteland ( not even roads to get there ) 9 of 10 properties I looked at were encumbered by this nonsense, usually by a dead boomer who was afraid of anything but a mansion next to his mobile home pig farm. Several times I was lied to by everyone and only discovered it during title search and only because I sifted through hundreds of pages of ancient scanned documents. It is truly a poison on the land and by design the proportion of encumbered land ratchets up with no way to reverse. * Theoretically the law requires them to have a way to be removed but clever lawyering makes it next to impossible for a regular person.