My husband and I own a unit in a two unit association. The other owner (who rents out his unit) has left the handling of the condo association entirely up to us, so I maintain the condo bank account and pay all the bills. Our current shared expenses are water/sewer and homeowners insurance so the monthly fee is only $100. The other unit owner has been delinquent in his payments for years and will only occasionally send a check for a partial payment, usually after I have e-mailed and called him several times. He otherwise never responds to my messages or communicates with us in anyway.

We finally consulted a lawyer about how best to deal with the situation and he recommended we write a letter to the other owner detailing his payment history (or lack thereof) with the current amount owed and a suggested payment schedule of a 3rd of the the total plus the current month's fee for the next 3 months in order to get caught up or enforce the provisions of Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 183A and direct his tenants to pay rent to the association until his fees were payed in full. Shortly after we sent this letter (by Regular, Certified Mail and E-Mail) we discovered his tenants were moving out and it was too late to get rent from them.

While the other unit owner did send a check for the first installment o f the payment plan we'd provided about a month later, he's yet to pay a single cent since and is now in arrears almost as much as when we sent the letter. The other owner had apparently been trying to sell his unit for several months but it is now off the market and new renters just moved in. However, the renters appear to be buddies with the owner and we're wondering if they'll be reluctant to pay the rent to the association. I just received the invoice for our home owner's insurance and we are about $600 short of the amount in the condo account. Plus a water pipe in our basement looks in serious need of repair and we need to have some shingles replaced on the roof so we really need the money now.

So to sum up: my questions are basically: How do we go about collecting rent from the renters? Do we just show them a copy of the letter and condo docs? What if they don't take it seriously or think we're trying to scam them? Should we just go ahead and file a lien on the other unit? If we end up having to pay out-of-pocket to cover the Home Owner's Insurance and house repairs, is their anyway to guarantee that we'll be reimbursed?