Indiana panel: trial court cannot cut an association's fees without a hearing
Indiana panel: trial court cannot cut an association's fees without a hearing
2026-09-10 · Indiana · Courts
What happened. On 31 October 2025 the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed a lien-foreclosure judgment in favour of a homeowners association on two independent grounds, both of which concerned money the trial court had declined to award.1
The case is Treyburn Lakes Homeowners Association, Inc. v. Solomon L. Scott, No. 25A-CC-646 — a published opinion from a panel of Judges May, Mathias and Bradford.
The posture
Treyburn Lakes had already obtained three personal judgments against a delinquent owner between 2016 and 2021. Each of those judgments included an award of attorney fees, and each remained unpaid. The association then moved to foreclose the lien securing them.
The trial court granted the foreclosure — but wrote the decree in a way that left the association materially worse off than its paper judgments suggested. It excluded the unpaid attorney-fee components of the three earlier judgments from the amount secured. Then, without holding a hearing, it cut the association's fee request in the current action from $5,754 to roughly $1,424, a reduction of about 75 percent.
Both cuts were error
On the first point, the panel held that where the declaration and IC 34-55-9-2 make the lien security for the prior judgments, the prior judgments come in whole — fee awards included:
“[T]he trial court abused its discretion by failing to include the unpaid amounts of those attorney fee awards in the foreclosure judgment.”
On the second, the panel restated a rule of general Indiana practice that trial courts periodically forget when the fee request strikes them as disproportionate to the debt:
“[G]enerally, the reasonableness of the attorney's fees is a matter to be resolved in an evidentiary hearing.”
Reversed and remanded, with instructions to include the earlier unpaid fee and cost awards in the decree and to hold a hearing on the reasonableness of the current fees.
Why the first holding matters more to a board than the second
The evidentiary-hearing point will get the attention, because it reads like a win. The more durable holding is the first one, and it is about how associations structure collection over time.
Long-running delinquencies in Indiana tend to accumulate in layers: a judgment in year one, another in year three, another in year five, each carrying its own fee award, none of them collected. The practical question is whether those layers are secured, or whether the association is left holding unsecured personal judgments against someone who has already demonstrated they will not pay voluntarily. Treyburn Lakes answers that in the association's favour, provided the declaration does the work — the panel reasoned from the recorded document plus IC 34-55-9-2, not from a free-standing statutory entitlement.
The drafting lesson
Read your declaration's lien clause against this opinion and ask a narrow question: does it secure “all amounts” reduced to judgment, including costs and fees previously awarded, or does it secure “assessments” only? Declarations written the second way invite exactly the decree the trial court entered here. That is a targeted amendment, not a rewrite — though note that as of 1 July 2026 the consent threshold for amending Indiana governing documents is capped at two-thirds of owners, which makes such an amendment materially easier to pass than it was under a 75 percent requirement.
The fee-hearing point, used properly
The holding cuts both ways. An evidentiary hearing is a forum in which fees are examined, not rubber-stamped. An association that arrives at one with block-billed entries, no rate justification and $5,754 of time on a routine foreclosure may find the hearing confirms the trial court's instinct rather than reversing it.
What the case gives the association is process, not an outcome. To use it:
- Keep contemporaneous, itemised time records from the first demand letter, not from the date suit is filed.
- Be ready to justify the rate by reference to comparable community-association work in the relevant Indiana county.
- Segregate the work attributable to the owner's own conduct — missed deadlines, motions to correct error, discovery disputes — because that is the portion most defensible as reasonable.
For the owner on the other side
The mirror-image reading is worth stating plainly, because it is the more common situation. A delinquency that produces serial judgments produces serial fee awards, and after Treyburn Lakes those awards travel with the lien. The gap between the assessments actually missed and the sum ultimately secured against the home widens with every round. There is no point in the sequence at which the fees stop compounding except payment or settlement.
What to watch
The opinion issued on 31 October 2025 and we have not confirmed whether transfer to the Indiana Supreme Court was sought or ruled on. Check the transfer docket before relying on it in a live matter.
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