Community association enforcement
HOACovenant records each violation against the lot, the covenant article and the date the photograph was taken, then carries it through courtesy notice, first notice, second notice and cure. When an owner disputes a fine two years later, the whole file prints in the order a hearing panel expects.
What goes wrong
Most volunteer boards enforce carefully and still lose the argument, because the record lives in a group text, a shoebox of printed letters and one director's camera roll. Here is what that costs a community over a single fiscal year.
The trailer was parked on the driveway for eleven weeks. The owner says it was two days. The picture that would settle it sits in a former director's phone, and that director moved to Tampa in April.
$3,150Median outside counsel spend on one contested fineLot 214 got a courtesy note about the same peeling trim that earned Lot 87 a $50 fine. Nobody meant to treat neighbors differently. Without a single log, selective enforcement is the easiest claim an owner can make.
7 of 10Fines that fail at hearing on inconsistency, not meritEvery second notice starts as a copy of last month's Word file. The dates get missed, the wrong covenant article gets cited, and the cure deadline says a Sunday that already passed.
9.5 hoursBoard time lost to letter drafting each monthThirty days ran out in March. Nobody re-inspected until July, so the file shows a violation that sat open for four months with no board action. That gap is the first thing an owner's attorney reads aloud.
38%Open violations that pass their deadline uncheckedHow the file is built
The board still decides what is a violation. HOACovenant only makes sure that the decision is dated, cited, photographed and carried to an ending.
Open the community roster on your phone, tap the lot number, photograph the condition, and pick the covenant article from your own recorded declaration. The address, the date and the compass direction of the shot are attached before you walk to the next mailbox.
The system knows whether this lot has an open history for the same article. It drafts the courtesy note, the first notice, the second notice or the hearing invitation accordingly, and it puts the photograph, the article text and the cure deadline in the letter without retyping.
Each notice starts a countdown you set in the association's own governing documents. Three days before the deadline the board gets a re-inspection reminder with a map of everything due that week, so a single walk closes six files.
A follow up photograph closes the file with a cured stamp and the date. If the condition persists, one button assembles the hearing packet: every notice, every photograph, every delivery record, in order, ready to hand to the panel and the owner.
Inside the product
Nothing here is borrowed from a generic ticketing tool. Every screen uses the vocabulary of your declaration, your rules and regulations and your state's notice requirements.
Every photograph is stored against the lot number, the covenant article and the moment it was taken, with the original file kept untouched. Reprint it two years later and the date on the page is the date on the camera.
We load your recorded CC&Rs, bylaws and rules once, then split them into citable articles with their own fine schedules. Enforcement staff pick a clause instead of paraphrasing one from memory.
Courtesy, first, second and hearing letters follow your association's own ladder and language, and the level is chosen by the file's history rather than by whoever is drafting. Print for certified mail or send by email with a delivery record either way.
Set the cure period once per violation type and the countdown runs on its own, including weekend and holiday handling. Each Friday the board sees one re-inspection list, sorted by street, with last week's photo beside each address.
Before a fine is issued, the file shows every other lot cited under the same article in the past 24 months and what happened to each. A board that can see its own pattern stops creating a selective enforcement argument by accident.
Choose a lot, choose a date range, and the packet builds itself: chronology, notices, photographs, delivery proof and the board's own minutes reference. Owners get the same copy the panel gets, which ends most arguments before the meeting.
What changes
These are medians from 218 communities running a complete enforcement year on HOACovenant, measured against the twelve months before they started.
A courtesy note with a photograph attached settles most conditions in the first cure window. Owners argue with a paragraph. They rarely argue with a picture of their own side yard.
Logging, citing and generating the letter happens in one sitting, usually at the kitchen table the same night. The old path ran to three evenings and a trip to the post office.
The enforcement report is generated, not assembled. Directors read a one page summary of what opened, what cured and what is due, instead of spending half the agenda reconstructing history.
Files stay complete through every board turnover and every change of management company. When a new secretary takes office in March, the community's memory is already sitting in the system.
From the boards themselves
Three communities that let us name them, in their own words, about the part of the job nobody volunteers for.
We had a homeowner threaten to sue over a fence stain fine. I printed the file: four photographs, three notices, the certified mail receipt and the article he signed at closing. His attorney called back the next day and the whole thing ended in nine minutes.
I manage nine associations with one part time inspector. Before this, every board wanted its own letter format and I kept nine folder trees. Now each community keeps its own language and I drive one route on Tuesday with one list on the phone.
The consistency view changed how our board votes. We found we had cited eleven lots for the same trash can rule and quietly forgiven four of them. We fixed that in one meeting, and our attorney told us it was the most useful hour we had spent all year.
Plans and prices
One flat monthly figure per association. Unlimited directors, unlimited photographs, unlimited notices, because charging a board per letter would be a strange way to encourage consistent enforcement.
$39 per month
For self managed communities where two or three volunteers do the walking and the writing.
$89 per month
For associations with a committee structure, an architectural review board and a real fine schedule.
$199 per month
For managers carrying a portfolio of associations, each with its own documents and its own fine ladder.
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time, effective at the end of the month you cancel in. There is no setup fee, no per notice charge and no annual contract. If your board votes to stop, you export the complete enforcement history first, and the file stays readable without our software.
Questions boards ask us first
If your question is not here, write to us and a person who has sat through a violation hearing will answer it.
Small Association is $39 per month, Community is $89 per month, and Management Company is $199 per month. The price covers the whole association rather than a seat, so adding a new director in October costs nothing. There is no charge per notice, per photograph or per hearing packet, and no setup fee at any tier. Most self managed communities of under 120 lots fund it out of the line item they already keep for postage and printing.
Send us your recorded declaration, your rules and regulations and a lot roster, and we load them for you within two business days. Most boards log their first violation on the evening of the day we hand the account over. Loading historical files is optional and can be done a street at a time as new violations come up. Nobody has to type a covenant article into a form to begin.
Everything is stored on servers in the United States, encrypted at rest and in transit, and it belongs to the association rather than to us. Only the directors and staff your board names can open a file, and every view of an owner record is written to an access log the board can read. We never sell association data, we never mine it for advertising, and we run no third party trackers inside the product. If the board leaves, you take a full export of photographs, letters and history with you.
HOACovenant handles enforcement only, and it is built to sit beside the system your treasurer already uses for assessments. Fines that reach a final vote can be exported as a dated charge file that most association accounting packages import directly, and we will map the columns for your package during onboarding. Lot rosters sync by scheduled CSV or by API, so an owner change of address does not need entering twice. We do not ask you to move your ledger.
You cancel from inside the account and the subscription ends at the close of that month, with no exit fee and no notice period. Before the account closes you download the complete archive: every photograph in its original form, every letter as a PDF and the whole chronology as a spreadsheet. We keep the data available for 30 days after cancellation in case a new secretary needs it, then delete it. Associations that come back later can have that archive reloaded.
In a better position, and usually with a smaller invoice for the association. Your counsel reviews and approves the letter language once, we load his wording as the association template, and the board stops paying hourly to redraft the same second notice. When a matter does need him, he receives a complete packet instead of a folder of forwarded photographs. Several of our associations were introduced to us by their own community association attorney for exactly that reason.
Notice and Cure
Notice and Cure is where we write down what the files teach us: how to photograph a condition so it survives a hearing, what a notice has to say before anyone mails it, and which remedy is worth the trouble it costs.
practical guide
Where to stand, how to frame the address with the condition, why screenshots destroy your timestamps, and how to shoot a cure photo that lines up with the first one a year later.
checklist
A line by line pass over the notice letter: cited covenant, observation date, cure deadline, hearing rights, fine schedule, delivery method and the copy you keep for the file.
comparison
Four enforcement paths, side by side: what your declaration and state statute authorize, what each one costs to run, how collectable it is, and which violation types it actually fits.
Talk to us
Tell us about the file your board is arguing about right now: the fence, the boat, the trash cans, the roof color nobody approved. We will show you what that same file looks like when it is dated, cited and finished.
A named person replies within one business day, usually the same evening. Nothing is passed to a call center.
Prefer plain email? Write directly to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.
Written and maintained by Jimenez Julien, who builds narrow software for people who run things after work. He sat through the board meetings that produced this product and still answers the support mail himself.