The North Carolina Court of Appeals waded into territory that has become increasingly challenging for developers and homeowners' associations (HOAs) to navigate: the regulation of short-term rentals....more
A shocking, criminal incident in Florida recently garnered national media attention when a unit owner was arrested and charged with injecting a poisonous chemical into a neighboring unit on several occasions. The liquid...more
California’s common law “business judgment rule,” as described by the courts, protects from court intervention “those management decisions which are made by directors in good faith in what the directors believe is the...more
The first step in challenging any homeowners association should be to carefully review their governing documents in the Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, Restrictions, and Easements (CC&Rs) to determine if there are any...more
Massive legislation legalizing marijuana in Virginia became law July 1, 2021. The legislation ranges from legalization of marijuana to expungement of criminal records involving marijuana offenses to funding a public awareness...more
As in previous years, the California Legislature passed a large volume of laws related to housing in the 2021 legislative session. (See Holland & Knight's previous annual recaps of California Housing Laws in the final section...more
Surfside Collapse – what we know so far: On Thursday, June 24, 2021, at approximately 1:25 a.m., Champlain Towers South, a twelve-story beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, partially...more
A planned community developer needs to control operation and administration of the covenants and community association for some period of time to ensure orderly development and sale of project. The developer has invested...more
The Texas Property Code allows developers and their attorney wide discretion on the types of provisions that may be set forth in a set of governance documents for a community. In our experience, we have noticed that many...more
Section 66-27-413 of the Tennessee Condominium Act includes specific requirements for insurance obtained by the condominium association for condominium regimes. If there are horizontal boundaries (residential units above...more
In a commercial or mixed-use condominium project, parking is a hot commodity (at least for the near to mid-term future). Since parking is an integrated part of the mixed-use condominium project, the developer and their...more
To preserve the marketability of a commercial or mixed-use condominium unit sold to a third-party, it may be necessary to include specialized minority owner protection provisions in the condominium declaration for the...more
The reason that many people want to live in a community that is governed by “Codes, Covenants and Restrictions” (“CC&R’s) is to have the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that everybody in the community is “playing by the...more
A Charlottesville Circuit Court held that a rule promulgated by a Virginia property owners’ association requiring residents to sign an assumption of the risk form prior to using certain common areas was reasonable. See...more
On February 20, 2020, the California Energy Commission approved its first community solar system under the 2019 Energy Code, which allows developers of new homes within Sacramento Municipal Utility District (“SMUD”) to meet...more
For the last several years, there has been a tremendous amount of litigation in Nevada arising from residential foreclosure sales conducted by homeowners’ associations (HOA). The main issue in those cases has been whether the...more
In the not-so-distant past, if you wanted to get from one place to another without a car of your own, you would call a taxi, with your only choice being which of the many taxicab companies to call upon. Now, of course,...more
In my last post, “Real Estate Alphabet Soup: G is for Guaranty” I continued my primer on the “alphabet soup” of real estate. This post continues to stir the “alphabet soup” with the letter “H.”...more
In recent years Los Angeles has experienced an unprecedented wave of mega-mansion development, which has inevitably changed the aesthetic and character of some of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods. In turn, some residents...more
In Western Heritage Ins. Co. v. Frances Todd, Inc. 2019 Cal. App. Lexis 299, the Court of Appeals of California, First Appellate District, addressed whether a commercial condominium association’s carrier could subrogate...more
In Western Heritage Ins. Co. v. Frances Todd, Inc. (No. A152428, filed 3/4/19, ord. pub. 4/2/19), a California appeals court held that a condominium association’s fire insurer was barred from suing a tenant in subrogation for...more
In September 2018, in Baumgartner v. Timmins, 245 Ariz. 334, 429 P.3d 567, the Arizona Court of Appeals provided further clarification on what constitutes an “encumbrance” on a property for purposes of Arizona’s statutory...more
In California, priority between competing liens on the same real property is usually determined by the “first in time, first in right” rule. Under that rule, different liens on the same property have priority according to...more
The California Supreme Court has adopted a rule of deference to most decisions made by community association boards...more
In a recent case, the Texas Supreme Court addressed an attempt by a homeowners’ association (“HOA”) to restrict short-term rentals based upon recorded Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (“CC&Rs”) applicable to a...more