The person behind the product
Jimenez Julien, founder and product lead of HOACovenant
One person publishes this product, answers its mail and owns its mistakes. That person is me, and this page explains how I got here and what I hold myself to.
Why I built a covenant enforcement file
HOACovenant started with a folder. A friend of mine took over as secretary of a 176 lot association outside Raleigh and inherited a plastic bin: printed letters with no dates, a memory card of photographs nobody could match to an address, and a spiral notebook where a previous director had written street names next to the word warned. Her first task was a hearing about a shed. The board could not prove when the shed appeared, could not show the owner had been told twice, and could not find the article they were citing. They dropped the matter, and the next owner who built without approval had a precedent to point at.
That is not a software problem in the usual sense. Nobody on that board wanted a dashboard. What they needed was the discipline of a paper file, kept without the paper: a date attached to a photograph the moment it is taken, a covenant article picked from the recorded document rather than remembered, and a letter that names the level it is at. I spent the following year sitting in on board meetings, riding along on inspection drives in three states and reading a great many declarations, which are more interesting documents than people assume. HOACovenant is what came out of that.
What I learned about this trade
Community association work runs on volunteers who already have jobs. The president is a nurse. The treasurer sells insurance. Enforcement happens on a Sunday afternoon between errands, and the tool has to survive being used with one hand while walking a sidewalk. Anything that needs a laptop and twenty quiet minutes gets skipped, and skipped enforcement is what turns into a lawsuit two years later.
The second thing I learned is that consistency matters more than severity. Owners rarely fight a rule. They fight the sense that the rule was applied to them and not to the house on the corner. Every serious dispute I sat through came back to the same question: what did the board do the last time this happened? A board that can answer that question in ten seconds almost never ends up in front of a judge. So the product treats the history of the community as its central object, not the individual ticket.
The third thing is that managers and volunteer boards want different things from the same record. A manager with nine associations needs one route, one list, one set of habits. A volunteer board needs its own letterhead, its own language and the feeling that this is their community's file rather than a vendor's database. Both of those are in the product, and neither of them is an afterthought.
Experience and expertise
- Founder of MLJ, SASU, a French company that publishes narrow, single purpose software for operators in specific trades, including this one.
- Eleven years building document heavy systems where the record has to hold up later: evidence chains, dated correspondence, retention rules and export formats that outlive the vendor.
- Field work with volunteer boards and small management companies in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Ohio, including ride alongs on inspection rounds and attendance at open board meetings.
- A working reading knowledge of the documents this trade lives in: declarations, bylaws, rules and regulations, fine schedules and state notice requirements that differ by jurisdiction.
- Direct responsibility for support. The mail that arrives at the address on this site reaches me, not a queue.
How this product is built and maintained
Every claim on this website is one I can show you inside the product. If a number appears on the home page, it comes from aggregate usage across the associations that run on HOACovenant, and I will tell you the sample size if you ask. I do not publish a feature until boards are using it in a real enforcement year, and I remove features that turn out to be used by nobody rather than leaving them to rot in a menu.
Product decisions come from three sources: support mail, the monthly calls I hold with a group of eleven boards and managers, and watching where files stall. When a violation sits open past its cure date, that is usually a design failure rather than a board failure, and it goes on the list. Releases go out on Wednesdays, the change log is written in plain language for people who are not in software, and anything that touches evidence handling is announced before it ships rather than after.
On editorial standards: the copy on this site is written by me, reviewed against the product, and corrected when it drifts. Testimonials are published with the permission of the named person and their association, and the wording is theirs. There are no stock quotes and no invented communities. If you find a statement here that the product does not support, write to me and I will fix the page the same week.
Published articles
These are the nine reports I have written so far for Notice and Cure, the covenant enforcement magazine published alongside HOACovenant.
- How to Photograph a Covenant Violation So the File Holds Up
- Every Line a Covenant Violation Notice Needs Before Mailing
- Fines, Suspension, Self-Help or Suit: Choosing an HOA Remedy
- Board Habits That Hand Owners a Selective Enforcement Defense
- When a Violation Notice Meets a Fair Housing Accommodation Request
- HOA Fine Caps, Notice Periods and Cure Windows by State
- State Laws Now Overriding CC&R Yard, Solar and Rental Rules
- Anatomy of a Fence Violation File, First Notice to Cure
- What a Two-Hour Community Inspection Drive Actually Covers
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and you will hear from me, usually within one business day. Good reasons to write include a demo for your board, a question about how your state handles notice periods, a correction to something on this site, or a feature your community needs and cannot find here. If you would rather see the product before you talk to anyone, the four step walkthrough on the home page shows the whole enforcement file, and the pricing section holds no surprises.
You can also find me at jimenezjulien.com, on X, on LinkedIn, on Facebook and on Instagram.
This page is maintained by Jimenez Julien and was last reviewed on March 2, 2026. Corrections are welcome at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.