Two major reforms take effect September 12, 2026 — and these maneuvers are built to satisfy the letter of the law while defeating its purpose. Here’s what homeowners should watch for.
The A.R.S. § 33-1813 removal process — petition, special meeting, and vote — step by step.
Your Fair Housing Act rights — assistance animals, accessible parking, ramps, and rule variances — and how to ask for them.
A board can adopt house rules and design guidelines to implement the declaration. But if a “rule” changes a fundamental right the CC&Rs grant or protect, it’s really an amendment — and that takes an owner vote, not a board memo.
Records productions sometimes arrive with other people’s personal, financial, or health information left unredacted. Even though the association failed to protect it, the right move — and the smart one — is to keep it private, not post it or weaponize it.
A balance sheet tells you totals; it doesn’t show where the money actually went. To see that, request the underlying records — the check register and the vendor invoices — which you’re entitled to as association records.
A board can adopt rules — but only within the authority its governing documents grant, only consistent with the declaration and Arizona statute, and only reasonably. A rule that oversteps those limits is unenforceable, no matter how official it looks.
When you ask for records, “it’s all on the portal” isn’t compliance. A member portal is controlled by the association, rarely holds everything you’re entitled to, and can change or vanish. Your statutory records request is a separate, enforceable right.
Given the right materials, an AI assistant is a genuinely useful HOA co-pilot — it can make sense of your governing documents, point you to the right statute, draft records requests, and organize your timeline. Here’s what to load into a project, what to ask, and where AI trips up.
A management company only has the authority the Board delegated to it in writing — and only powers the Board itself holds. Request the management contract (it’s a record you’re entitled to see) and check what’s delegated against your governing documents.
Non-lawyer management staff generally can’t give legal opinions on the HOA’s behalf. But you probably aren’t a lawyer either — so the strongest move isn’t to out-lawyer them, it’s to raise the concern as a documented question for the Board’s own counsel.
Every email, letter, invoice, notice, and meeting packet is potential evidence. Boards change, managers leave, and people later deny what they agreed to. Save it all — to the cloud and in more than one place — so the record is yours, not theirs.