A rental policy tends to arrive in pieces. A complaint about a rented house produces a rule about notices. A wave of new landlords produces talk of a cap. A tenant asks for a pool key and nobody knows whether to give one. Each piece made sense when it was written, and together they don't add up to a policy.
Nolo's guide to renting in an HOA community notes that "HOA rental restrictions can vary widely, from a complete ban on rentals to no restrictions at all." Wherever your community lands on that range, these six steps put the pieces in order.
Step 1: Read the declaration and the law that sits above it
Start with what already exists. Find every leasing provision in the declaration, the bylaws and any adopted rules. Note which document each provision sits in and the date it was adopted or last amended. Those dates matter when the board compares a provision against a statute passed later, and when an owner who bought years ago asks which version applies to them. Then check whether your state has a leasing statute for HOAs, because a statute can override a recorded clause. Our guide to HOA rental restrictions explains the three layers a leasing limit can come from.
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Step 2: Decide what needs a rule and what needs an amendment
For each thing the board wants to do, ask whether it regulates how owners rent or narrows the right to rent at all. Caps, bans and minimum lease terms may need the declaration; registration and notice routing may fit a board rule, if the documents give the board that power. Your declaration and your attorney decide which is which for your community.
If a cap is on the table, our post on HOA rental caps covers counts, waitlists, hardship exceptions and what happens to owners already renting. If the question is lease length or lease approval, see minimum lease terms and lease approval. Nightly and weekly rentals are a separate problem, covered in HOA short-term rental rules.
Step 3: Register tenants
A registration requirement tells the board who lives in each rented home and how to reach them. Keep the form short, collect only what the documents support, and leave off anything that touches a protected class. Some states, Texas among them, list what an association may request. The fields are in Tenant Registration: What an HOA Can Ask Landlords For.
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Step 4: Enforce through the owner
When a tenant breaks a rule, the notice goes to the owner at the owner's address of record, with a copy to the tenant where the documents allow it. Fines follow the same steps as for any owner. Keep a copy of every notice in the unit's record, with the date it went out and the address it went to. When a tenant breaks HOA rules covers notices, fines and repeat violations, including how Florida's statute brings tenants into the picture.
Step 5: Charge only the fees your documents allow
Registration fees, move-in fees and damage deposits each need their own authority and their own written terms. HOA rental fees covers what each one is for and how to set it. For the regular assessments on a rented home, see Do Renters Pay HOA Fees?
Step 6: Review the policy every year
Put the rental policy on the agenda once a year. Check the rental count against any cap, the waitlist, the hardship exceptions, the fees, and any change in your state's law. A statute passed since the policy was written can make part of it unenforceable.
Checking the fees against their cost means pulling what the association actually spent processing registrations and repairing move-related damage over the year, and adjusting any fee that no longer matches. Check the hardship exceptions too: an exception granted for a set period should end when the period does, or come back to the board for a recorded decision.
The check that runs through every step
At each step, ask whether the rule treats people differently for a reason fair housing law forbids. The Justice Department's Fair Housing Act overview lists the protected characteristics as race or color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status and disability, and says the Act covers "direct providers of housing, such as landlords and real estate companies as well as other entities." A rental policy decides who can live in the community and on what terms, and that makes it housing policy. Run anything the board is unsure of past the association's attorney before it's adopted.
Putting it in one place
Write the finished policy as a single document and keep it with the governing documents where owners and tenants can read it.
HOA-OS keeps the governing documents and adopted rules in the community's document library, each unit's residents and violation history on the unit's own page, and tenant registration forms in the form builder. The unit pages and the form builder are part of the Community plan. Start a 30-day free trial, no card needed, from hoa-os.com/pricing.
Related Reading
- The HOA Grandfather Clause: What It Protects and What It Doesn't
- Fair Housing Mistakes HOAs Don't Know They're Making
- How to Amend Your HOA's CC&Rs: A Step-by-Step Guide
The rental policy the next board inherits should be one document, with a source next to every rule.