Guide To Buying Or Selling In An HOA In Pittsburgh
Everything you've heard about HOAs is true. It's also not the part that will cost you money.
The horror story reels are a guilty pleasure watch. The board member measuring a neighbor's grass with a ruler. The $400 fine for the wrong shade of mailbox. The lady with the clipboard.
Most of it is hype. The overwhelming majority of HOAs around Pittsburgh are quiet, well-run, and profoundly boring — which is exactly what you want from an HOA. Nobody's making videos about an association that replaced a roof on schedule.
Here's what nobody's making videos about, and it's the part that actually empties bank accounts.
In August 2026, Fannie Mae eliminated Limited Review for condominium loans. In January 2027, the minimum reserve requirement climbs from 10% to 15%. Meaning every conventional condo loan now gets a full financial audit of the association — no matter your down payment, no matter your credit. Buildings that financed fine last spring are getting loans denied this fall.
And Pennsylvania doesn't require associations to fund reserves at all. No mandated study. No minimum. Nothing.
Meanwhile the protection you do have — the resale certificate, your one legal window to read the rules and walk away with your deposit — is far shorter than almost anyone will tell you. I've heard agents quote it as fifteen days. I've heard seven. Paragraph 16 of the Pennsylvania Agreement of Sale says five, and there's a second deadline hiding in front of it.
That's what this guide is about. Not the clipboard lady.
Inside:
- How the resale certificate clock actually works
- The second monthly HOA fee that never shows up on Zillow
- What "non-warrantable" does to your down payment
- The two separate government approval lists FHA and VA buyers have to clear
- The contingency window sellers can't control
Twelve minutes. Worth considerably more than twelve minutes of grief.
Everything You've Heard About HOAs Is True. It's Also Not the Part That Will Cost You Money.
If you’re like me, the HOA horror story reels are a guilty pleasure watch. The board member measuring a neighbor’s grass with a ruler. The $400 fine for the wrong shade of mailbox. The lady with the clipboard. You know the ones. They’re a blood-pressure event disguised as entertainment.
Here’s the good news, and I mean it: most of that is hype. The overwhelming majority of HOAs in the Pittsburgh area are quiet, well-run, and profoundly boring — which is exactly what you want from an HOA. The algorithm doesn’t serve you videos of an association that replaced a roof on schedule and under budget.
But here’s the part nobody’s making videos about, and it’s the part that actually empties bank accounts.
In August of 2026, Fannie Mae eliminated the Limited Review process for condominium loans. In January of 2027, the minimum reserve requirement climbs from 10% to 15%. In plain English: every conventional condo loan in America now gets put through a full financial audit of the association — no matter how much you’re putting down, no matter how good your credit is. Communities that financed fine last spring are getting loans denied this fall. Not because of anything the buyer did. Because of the HOA’s balance sheet.
And Pennsylvania, unlike a lot of states, does not require an association to fund reserves at all. No mandated reserve study. No statutory minimum. Nothing.
So you have a brand-new federal standard that judges associations on their reserves, sitting on top of a state that never required them to have any. That gap is where deals are dying right now.
Meanwhile, the protection you do have in Pennsylvania — the resale certificate, your one legal window to read the rules and walk away with your deposit — is far shorter than almost anyone will tell you. I’ve watched agents quote it as fifteen days. I’ve watched agents quote it as seven. Paragraph 16 of the Pennsylvania Agreement of Sale says five, and there’s a second deadline hiding in front of it that most people never see coming.
That’s the stuff this guide is about. Not the clipboard lady.
Seventy-Five Hours
One more thing before we get into it, and I’m going to be blunt because being polite about this has a body count.
Almost every HOA deal I’ve watched fall apart fell apart because somebody on one side of it didn’t know these rules existed. A buyer’s agent who’s never read Paragraph 16 closely. A listing agent who typed a fee into the MLS without calling the management company. An agent on either side who has no idea the VA maintains a separate approved list, or what “non-warrantable” means, or that the review window is five days.
And when one of those deals dies, it doesn’t die cleanly on day three. It dies on day thirty-five, after the appraisal, after the inspection, after the buyer has paid for all of it and the seller has been off the market for over a month. The buyer is out real money and the seller is relisting a house that now looks damaged. Nobody wins. Both sides lose, and neither of them did anything wrong.
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t me taking shots at individuals. It’s the bar.
To be licensed as a real estate salesperson in Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth requires you to be 18, hold a high school diploma, complete 75 hours of coursework, and pass an exam. Then, per the Department of State’s own published requirements: “No experience required for licensure.” After that it’s 14 hours of continuing education every two years.
Seventy-five hours. That’s less than two work weeks. And then you’re qualified — legally, fully qualified — to guide somebody through the largest financial transaction of their life.
I don’t think the people entering this business are bad people. Most of them are trying hard. I think we hand them a license and a business card after 75 hours and then act surprised when a deal blows up over something nobody ever taught them. That’s not their failure. It’s ours, collectively, for setting the bar there — and I’d like to see it raised, loudly and on the record.
But the bar is where it is today, and you’re the one buying a house today. So: I’m not saying hire me. I’m saying whoever you hire, ask them about this stuff before you sign anything. If the answers are vague, you’ve learned something valuable for free.
What an HOA Actually Is
A Homeowners Association exists to keep a community clean, safe, consistent, and functioning. In exchange for a fee, you get things a single-family homeowner has to handle themselves — lawn care, snow removal, common area maintenance, sometimes the roof over your head, sometimes your water, sometimes your cable.
Every HOA is run by a board. And here’s the thing people forget: that board is made of your neighbors. Not a corporation. Not a government. Homeowners who ran for a volunteer position, and often ran unopposed because nobody else showed up.
Which brings me back to those horror stories. Almost every one of them is the same story: a small group of people with too much authority and not enough opposition. The fix isn’t moving out. The fix is showing up — go to meetings, read the minutes, run for a seat, rally your neighbors and vote them out. Inaction is what empowers the clipboard. Nothing changes in an HOA because someone posted about it.
Condominium or Planned Community?
In Pennsylvania your community is legally one of two things, and this has nothing to do with what the building looks like. A townhouse can be either. So can a detached single-family home. Same look, different laws, different loan rules, different disclosure obligations.
Condominium
Governed by
The Uniform Condominium Act of Pennsylvania. Your resale rights live in Section 3407.
What you own
Your unit’s interior. The association owns the structure and the land around it.
Dues
Usually allocated by each unit’s percentage interest in the association — so the fee varies unit to unit.
Financing
Subject to full condominium project review, warrantability standards, and FHA or VA project approval.
Planned Community (PUD / Homeowner Association)
Governed by
The Uniform Planned Community Act. Your resale rights live in Section 5407(a).
What you own
Your lot and your building. The association owns and maintains the common areas.
Dues
Typically a flat community assessment rather than a percentage-interest allocation.
Financing
A true fee-simple PUD generally needs no project approval at all — it’s treated much like a single-family home.
The Two Checkboxes That Decide Which Set of Rules Protects You
Your Agreement of Sale handles this in Paragraph 16 with two checkboxes — one for CONDOMINIUM, one for PLANNED COMMUNITY. And the default position is telling: “Property is NOT a Condominium or part of a Planned Community unless checked below.”
Unchecked means not applicable. Which means if your agent doesn’t check the right box, the contract says the laws protecting you don’t apply.
Two checkboxes. That’s the whole margin between having a legal right to read the HOA documents and walk away with your deposit, and arguing about it later.
The Four Fees You Will Actually Encounter
Three of these show up at closing or on a monthly statement. The fourth shows up when you least want it to.
The monthly association fee
The core dues. Often escrowed with your mortgage payment. This is the number listing agents type into the MLS — and the number that’s frequently wrong.
The management company fee
Most associations of any size hire a property manager who bills owners a separate administrative fee, commonly $20 to $40 a month. It is not part of the association dues, it is usually not in the MLS, and it is usually not in your escrow. It just shows up.
The capital contribution
A one-time payment at closing, also called a capitalization fee or initiation fee. Commonly a few hundred to a little over a thousand dollars, and many Pittsburgh associations set it as two or three months of dues. The buyer almost always pays it. It is not a deposit — you never get it back.
The special assessment
If the association needs money it doesn’t have — a roof fails, a retaining wall goes, a pipe network needs replaced — it can levy a bill against every owner. Not a fee increase. A bill. This is the one that hurts.
A Listing Says $105. Your Real Obligation Is $145.
Here’s something even a lot of Pittsburgh agents miss. The HOA fee you see on Zillow is often not the whole fee.
A listing says $105 a month. Zillow says $105 a month. Your actual obligation is $125 to $145 a month, because the management company’s administrative fee gets billed separately, on a different schedule, to a different entity.
On a 30-year note, forty dollars a month is over fourteen thousand dollars. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a car.
I now verify this independently on every single transaction, because I’ve been burned by the MLS often enough to stop trusting it. Which is the broader point: treat the MLS field as a rumor, not a fact. In my experience the HOA information in a Pittsburgh listing is complete and correct maybe ten percent of the time. It’s often blank. It’s often stale by two fee increases.
What the Fee Actually Buys
This varies enormously, and the variance is the whole story.
At the light end: common area maintenance, landscaping, snow removal, maybe exterior lighting. At the heavy end — and this is common in older Pittsburgh condo communities — the fee covers roofs, siding, windows, sliding doors, exterior insurance, water, sewer, trash, sometimes gas or heat when the building runs on shared meters, and occasionally basic cable. A few older associations still handle landlord-grade interior repairs like a leaking valve or a clogged line, though that’s getting rare.
Pennsbury Village is a good local example, and one I know well because I sell a lot of homes there. It’s a West Hills condominium community that’s incorporated as its own borough. Fees average somewhere around $400 a month — some units run closer to $375, some closer to $425 — and that number sounds enormous right up until you see what it covers: replacement of windows, sliding glass doors, and roofs, plus gas, among a long list of other things. Residents there are getting real value for it.
Notice that the fee varies by unit. That’s normal in a condominium, where dues are usually allocated by each unit’s percentage interest in the association — roughly, bigger unit, bigger share. So the fee your neighbor quotes you is their fee, not yours. Always get the number for the specific unit you’re buying.
And then there’s the opposite. When a city condo is priced suspiciously low, the fee is almost always the reason. A $100,000 condo in Oakland or Downtown sounds like the deal of the decade right up until you learn the fee is $1,300 a month. At that point you’re not buying a cheap condo. You’re buying a very expensive lease with a deed attached.
The list price is half of the price. The fee is the other half. Run both numbers or don’t run either.
The Amenity You’re Paying For But Not Using — and the One That Kills Loans
Pennsbury Village also illustrates something worth knowing generally: an association can offer an amenity without including it in your dues. The pool there is a separate fee. It’s not hidden and it’s not unusual — plenty of communities run the pool, the fitness room, a marina slip, or a storage unit as an optional add-on.
But it means “the community has a pool” and “I have access to the pool” are two different sentences, and a lot of buyers tour a community in July, see the pool, and assume. Ask which amenities your dues actually buy and which ones cost extra.
Then there’s the version of this that isn’t a budgeting question at all.
If a community requires owners to pay dues to a third-party organization that owns the amenity — a golf club, a private recreation facility, a marina the association doesn’t own — that can make the entire project ineligible for a conventional loan. Fannie Mae’s rule is about ownership: the project generally has to own its own amenities, with narrow exceptions for shared-amenity agreements between associations. Mandatory dues to an outside entity you don’t control is a disqualifier.
So an optional pool fee for a pool the association owns is a line item. A mandatory membership in something the association doesn’t own is a financing problem. Those look nearly identical in a brochure and they are not remotely the same thing.
Who Actually Enforces Reserve Funding in Pennsylvania
You remember the condo building that collapsed in Surfside, Florida in 2021. Ninety-eight people died, and the investigation that followed exposed how many associations across the country were carrying serious deferred maintenance with nowhere near the money to address it.
Here’s where I have to correct something you may have heard, including from me at one point: Pennsylvania does not require associations to fund reserves. There’s no mandated reserve study. There’s no statutory minimum balance. There’s no required update cycle. Board members have a fiduciary duty to act prudently, and Section 3407 requires the association to disclose what reserves exist — but the law makes them tell you, not fund it.
So who ended up enforcing reserve funding in Pennsylvania? The mortgage industry. And they did it in 2026.
The 2026 Condo Loan Changes
This is the biggest shift in condominium lending in more than a decade, and most buyers have no idea it happened.
The headline is counterintuitive, so read it twice: your down payment no longer protects you. You can put 30% down with an 800 credit score and the lender is still required to audit the association’s finances. The building has to qualify, not just you.
What Changed
Limited Review is gone
As of August 3, 2026, Fannie Mae retired the Limited Review process entirely. Previously a buyer putting a substantial amount down could get a condo loan with a light-touch look at the association. That option no longer exists. Every established project now goes through a Full Review or qualifies for a narrow waiver.
Reserves go from 10% to 15%
Effective January 4, 2027, a project’s budget must allocate at least 15% of annual assessment income to replacement reserves, up from 10%. For an association that’s been running lean, that is a very large number to find.
The accounting shortcut is closed
Lenders can no longer accept the “baseline funding” method — the approach that let an association’s cash reserves drift toward zero between projects. Projects now have to budget to the highest reserve allocation their reserve study recommends.
Insurance got stricter
A master policy’s per-unit deductible is capped at $50,000. If the master policy carries a per-unit deductible, or doesn’t cover interior improvements, you’re required to carry an individual HO-6 policy — and your own deductible can’t exceed the greater of 5% of coverage or $2,500.
Delinquency still bites
If more than 15% of units are 60 or more days behind on their assessments, the project fails.
Critical repairs are an automatic stop
A project “in need of critical repairs” is ineligible, full stop. Unsafe conditions, significant deferred maintenance, an evacuation order — any of those and the loan doesn’t happen at any price.
What This Means For You
Underwriting takes longer. Full Review means the lender is collecting a multi-page association questionnaire, certified budgets, a current balance sheet, insurance certificates, and reserve studies. Expect two to four weeks longer than a comparable single-family purchase. If your Agreement of Sale has a standard mortgage contingency and nobody adjusted it for a condo, you have a problem on day 31 that you could have solved on day 1.
The association can fail you. Not your credit. Not your income. Not your appraisal. The building. And you will find out late, because the questionnaire goes out after you’re under contract.
These questions belong before the offer, not after. The reserve percentage, the delinquency rate, whether there’s a reserve study and what funding method it uses, whether there’s active litigation, whether there’s any deferred maintenance flagged in the last two years of minutes. All of that is knowable before you sign anything — if somebody knows to ask.
Most agents are still operating on the pre-August rules. That’s not a character flaw. It’s that this changed quietly, it changed fast, and nobody sends a newsletter to every licensee in Allegheny County. But it does mean that buying a condo in Pittsburgh right now with an agent who hasn’t done one since spring is a genuinely expensive gamble.
Warrantable vs. Non-Warrantable
A warrantable condo meets Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s standards, so a normal lender can make you a normal loan. A non-warrantable one doesn’t — and conventional financing isn’t harder or more expensive. It’s off the table.
Warrantable
Down payment
As little as 3% to 5% on a conventional loan.
Rate
Standard market pricing.
Lender pool
Essentially every conventional lender.
On a $250,000 condo
Roughly $8,750 down at 3.5%.
Non-Warrantable
What triggers it
More than 50% investor-owned; a single entity owning more than 20% of units; commercial space over 35%; reserves below the required allocation; more than 15% of owners 60+ days delinquent; active litigation; unresolved structural deficiency or deferred maintenance; or a community that permits short-term rentals.
Down payment
Typically 15% to 30%, through a portfolio or non-QM lender.
Rate
Higher, to offset the lender holding the loan.
On a $250,000 condo
Roughly $50,000 down at 20%. Same unit. Same buyer. Different building status.
And It Can Change While You’re Under Contract
An association that was warrantable in June can be non-warrantable in October because a lawsuit got filed or the reserve study came back ugly. Status is a snapshot, not a property of the building.
The FHA List and the VA List Are Two Different Lists
This one costs Pittsburgh buyers deals every single year, and I’d wager most agents in this market have never checked either database.
If you’re using an FHA loan or a VA loan to buy a condominium, the entire project has to be on that program’s approved list. Not your credit. Not your file. The project.
And the two programs maintain completely separate databases. HUD runs the FHA condominium approval list. The VA runs its own condo report through its lender portal. A community approved by FHA is not automatically approved by VA, and vice versa. Different agencies, different standards, different renewal cycles.
FHA vs. VA Condo Approval
Two programs, two lists, two sets of rules. Approval under one tells you nothing about the other.
FHA
Approval expires
Renewed on roughly a three-year cycle. A building approved when your friend bought there in 2023 may have lapsed.
Single-Unit Approval
FHA will, in limited circumstances, approve one individual unit in an unapproved project — but it’s capped at a small percentage of the units in larger buildings, so those slots run out.
Where it lives
HUD’s condominium approval lookup.
VA
Approval
Generally granted for the life of the project rather than on a renewal cycle.
Single-Unit Approval
Does not exist. The whole project is approved or you are not using your VA benefit there.
Right of first refusal
The VA will not approve a project whose governing documents contain one. FHA has no equivalent prohibition.
Where it lives
The VA’s own condo report, through its lender portal.
Why the VA Keeps Its Own List — and Why It Matters in Pittsburgh
The VA’s standards aren’t FHA’s standards. The clearest example: the VA will not approve a project whose governing documents contain a right of first refusal, because a clause letting the association step in and buy the unit is incompatible with how the VA guarantees a loan.
Now look at Paragraph 16(C)(4) of the Pennsylvania Agreement of Sale. It specifically contemplates an association that holds a right of first refusal and spells out what the Seller reimburses you when they exercise it. Pennsylvania’s own standard contract assumes these communities exist here — because they do, and they’re not rare.
So a Pittsburgh condo community can be FHA-approved, warrantable for conventional, perfectly healthy financially, and still be a dead end for a veteran — because of one clause in a declaration that nobody opened.
Here’s how that actually plays out. A veteran writes an offer. Neither agent checks the VA list, because neither agent knows there is one. The appraisal gets ordered. The inspection gets paid for. Four weeks in, the lender pulls the declaration, finds the right of first refusal, and the loan is dead. The buyer — who served — is out the appraisal, the inspection, and a month. The seller is relisting into a market that now assumes something’s wrong with the house.
Two people got hurt. Neither of them made the mistake.
One more wrinkle worth knowing: townhouses and true fee-simple PUDs don’t need project approval at all — but only if they’re legally structured that way. The legal designation decides it, not the architecture.
Should I just hand you the lookup links? I thought about it, and here’s my honest answer. Those tools are public and you can find them in about thirty seconds. But checking a list only tells you the project’s status at this exact moment. It doesn’t tell you whether the approval expires in four months, whether the Single-Unit Approval slots are already spoken for, whether the project has been flagged in Fannie Mae’s internal Condo Project Manager system — which consumers cannot access at all — or whether the reserve ratio is about to fail the new 15% test in January.
A green checkmark on a public list is not the same as financeable. I’d rather tell you what the real question is than send you somewhere that gives you a confident wrong answer. If you’re looking at a specific building, call me. Checking it properly takes me about ten minutes and I’ll tell you what I find either way, whether you work with me or not.
The Resale Certificate and the Resale Packet
Remember my point about listing agents who don’t enter HOA information correctly? Pennsylvania’s legislature was apparently aware of the problem too, because the protection built into state law is substantial.
Any time you buy into an HOA in Pennsylvania, you’re entitled to a resale certificate — plus the declaration, the bylaws, and the rules and regulations. For a condominium, this comes from Section 3407 of the Uniform Condominium Act. For a planned community, Section 5407(a) of the Uniform Planned Community Act.
The certificate itself is required to disclose seventeen specific items, including:
- The monthly assessment, and any unpaid assessments or special assessments against the unit
- Any other fees owners have to pay
- Capital expenditures planned for the current fiscal year and the next two
- The amount of reserves for capital expenditures, and what portion is earmarked for specific projects
- The most recent balance sheet and income and expense statement
- The current operating budget
- Judgments against the association and the status of pending litigation
- Insurance coverage provided for unit owners
- Any known alterations violating the declaration
- Any known governmental violations or hazardous conditions
- The effect of any right of first refusal or other restraint on selling
Look at that list again with the lending sections in mind. The reserve balance. The capital expenditure plan. The budget. The litigation status. The resale certificate is the document that tells you whether your loan is going to survive. It is not paperwork. It’s the financial audit of the building you’re about to attach thirty years of your life to.
And the full packet — the declaration, bylaws, and rules, usually with meeting minutes attached — is where you find out how you’re actually going to be allowed to live.
Exactly How the Clock Works
These are the terms in Paragraph 16(C) of the Pennsylvania Agreement of Sale for resales — an existing home, not new construction from the builder. This is the part almost everyone gets wrong, including agents, so here it is precisely.
Within 15 days of the Execution Date — Seller orders it
Within 15 days from the Execution Date of the agreement, the Seller — at the Seller’s expense — requests the Certificate of Resale and supporting documents from the association. This is a deadline to order, not to deliver.
10 days — the association produces it
The Act gives the association 10 days from the Seller’s request to produce the certificate and documents.
Promptly — Seller delivers to Buyer
The Seller promptly delivers everything received to the Buyer. Note what this does not say: the Seller is not liable to you for the association’s delay, or for wrong information in the certificate.
5 days — your window to walk
The Buyer may declare the Agreement VOID at any time before receiving the documents, and for 5 days after receiving them — or until settlement, whichever happens first. Notice must be in writing. All deposit monies come back to the Buyer.
Five Days. Not Fifteen. Not Seven.
So where do fifteen and seven come from? They’re real numbers — they’re just from a different paragraph.
Paragraph 16(B) covers initial sales from the developer, the first sale of a unit after the community is created. There, you receive a Public Offering Statement and may void within 15 days for a condominium or 7 days for a planned community. If you’re buying brand new from a builder, those are your numbers. If you’re buying from a person who already lives there, you get five days from receipt.
I’ve heard the 15-day figure quoted confidently on resale transactions more than once. It is a very expensive thing to be confident and wrong about.
A Nightmare On Elm Street: Brad's HOA Horror Story
My friend Brad bought a two-year-old townhome in an HOA community on Elm Street. No, not that one, but still, and Elm Street. Second owner. He didn’t read his resale packet. Nobody made him, and it was a couple hundred pages of photocopied documents, so I understand the temptation.
The prior owner had painted every wall beige. Brad hated it, so he started repainting the interior white. He also decided to drop cable and had a satellite dish installed.
He didn’t have curtains up yet. The HOA’s most vigilant board member saw him inside, painting, and came pounding on the front door.
Turns out the rules required written HOA approval of paint colors — including the interior of your own home. And satellite dishes were flatly prohibited.
So Brad got fined, had to take the dish down, and then spent a year paying for a satellite contract he could not use while also paying Comcast. All of it was in the packet. All of it was findable. He just didn’t look.
(In fairness to Brad, he now reads everything. Including, I assume, the terms and conditions on apps. The man is a changed person.)
Three Things Buried in Paragraph 16
Most people never read this far into the contract. These three are the ones that bite.
The Seller is not liable if the association blows the deadline — or if the certificate is wrong
The contract says this outright: the Seller is not liable to the Buyer for the association’s failure to provide the certificate in a timely manner, or for any incorrect information provided by the association in the certificate. If the association tells you the reserve balance is healthy and it isn’t, your recourse is not against the seller.
Your right to void dies at settlement
“Whichever occurs first.” If the documents never arrive and you close anyway, you have waived it. Do not go to the table without them. Ever. If they’re not there, you have a decision to make before closing, not after.
Some associations hold a right of first refusal
If the association has the right to buy the property and exercises it, the Seller reimburses you for your inspection and certification costs, title search, title insurance, flood and hazard insurance, mine subsidence, and appraisal fees. Good. But you’ve also lost the house and several weeks — and an association with a right of first refusal is a hard stop for a VA buyer.
And One More Thing the Seller’s Disclosure Won’t Tell You
Pennsylvania’s Real Estate Seller Disclosure Law requires sellers to disclose known material defects. But for condominiums and cooperatives, those disclosures are limited to the seller’s own unit. Disclosures about common areas and common facilities are not required, because the law assumes the resale certificate covers them.
Which means the seller’s disclosure will not tell you about the roof, the parking deck, the elevator, the retaining wall, or the pool. Only the resale packet will. If you skim the packet because you already read the disclosure, you have read nothing about 90% of the property.
How to Read 200 Pages in 5 Days
Be strategic. You have five days, most people have jobs, and these documents are frequently photocopies of photocopies of photocopies from 1987. Read in this order.
1. The resale certificate itself
Reserves, budget, planned capital expenditures, litigation, unpaid assessments. This is your loan risk and your special-assessment risk in one document. Start here every time.
2. The last 12 to 24 months of meeting minutes
This is where deferred maintenance gets discussed long before it becomes a special assessment. Search for “roof,” “reserve,” “assessment,” “litigation,” and “study.”
3. The rules and regulations
Pets, parking, rentals, satellite dishes, exterior changes, and yes, paint. This is the Brad section.
4. The declaration
Right of first refusal, rental caps, and what the association owns versus what you own.
A legitimate shortcut
When the scans are clean enough to be readable, running them through an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT to summarize the rules and flag anything unusual is a genuinely good use of five days. Ask it specifically: what rules here would be difficult to comply with, and what does the financial picture look like. It won’t replace reading the certificate yourself. It will absolutely make 200 pages survivable.
If You’re Selling in an HOA, Read This Twice
Everything above is about protecting a buyer. This part is about a risk most sellers never hear about until it’s happening to them.
That resale certificate contingency is a window you cannot control, cannot shorten, and cannot negotiate away.
Do the math on the worst case. Fifteen days for the certificate to be ordered. Ten days for the association to produce it. Five days for the buyer to review it and walk. That’s thirty days — a full month your home is off the market, under contract, with a buyer who can terminate and take their entire deposit with them.
Thirty days of lost momentum in a market where days-on-market is the number buyers judge you by. And if it falls apart, you’re relisting a house that now looks like something went wrong with it.
This is fixable. Almost nobody fixes it.
What a Seller Should Actually Do
The day you decide to list, call the association
Before the sign goes up, contact your association’s office manager or management company and find out exactly what they require to issue a resale certificate. Some associations produce them in 48 hours. Some take the full ten days. Some are staffed by one part-time person and a fax machine.
Ask the critical question: do they need a signed agreement first?
Some associations will release the resale kit — the declaration, bylaws, rules, minutes — at any time, and only need the buyer’s name to issue the certificate itself. If yours works that way, get the kit in hand now. Your contractual obligation is to deliver the documents for review, and having 90% of that package sitting ready collapses your exposure from thirty days to about a week.
Order the certificate the day you accept an offer
Not day ten. Not day fourteen. Day one. If your association takes the full ten days to fulfill and you waited until day fourteen to order, you’ve blown the contractual deadline and handed your buyer a clean termination for breach.
Budget for it
The certificate is ordered at the Seller’s expense.
Ask your agent one question
“When are you ordering the resale certificate, and have you confirmed how long my association takes?” If the answer is vague, you now know something useful about who you’re working with.
The Checklists
Print these. Take them with you. They are the whole guide compressed into questions you can ask out loud.
Before You Write an Offer
Confirm the legal structure
Condominium or planned community — not what it looks like.
Confirm the total monthly obligation
Including any separate management company fee. Get the figure for your specific unit.
Ask what the fee includes — and what it doesn’t
In writing, not from the MLS. Ask specifically which amenities cost extra.
Ask about the capital contribution
The one-time amount due at closing.
Ask about special assessments
Currently levied, planned, or under discussion.
Ask the reserve percentage and whether there’s a current reserve study
And what funding method the study uses.
Ask the delinquency rate
Over 15% at 60+ days and conventional financing fails.
Ask whether there is any active litigation
This alone can make a project non-warrantable.
Ask whether the project is warrantable
And have your lender confirm it rather than guess.
FHA buyer: confirm HUD approval and that it hasn’t lapsed
Approvals renew on roughly a three-year cycle.
VA buyer: confirm VA approval and check the declaration for a right of first refusal
A separate list, and a separate disqualifier.
Confirm Paragraph 16 is checked correctly
The right box, for the right structure.
Build a mortgage contingency that fits a condo
Two to four extra weeks for Full Review.
The Moment You’re Under Contract
Confirm in writing when the Seller ordered the resale certificate
Day one, not day fourteen.
Calendar the 5-day review window the day the documents land
It starts on receipt and it does not pause.
Read in order
Certificate first, minutes second, rules third, declaration fourth.
Do not go to settlement without the documents in hand
Your right to void dies at the table.
One Last Thing
If you’re buying a condo or a home in an HOA community anywhere in the Pittsburgh area — Mt. Lebanon, Bethel Park, Upper St. Clair, Robinson, Moon, Pennsbury Village, Downtown, or anywhere in between — the single most valuable thing you can do is find out whether the building can be financed before you fall in love with the unit.
I’ve been hard on my own industry for several thousand words and you deserve to know why. I came into this business because of transactions I watched go badly — some of them mine — where the damage was preventable and nobody involved knew what they’d missed. It’s why I think the licensing bar in this state should be considerably higher than 75 hours and a test, and I’ll keep saying that whether or not it makes me popular at the office.
Until it changes, the best I can do is make sure the people in front of me know what I know. That’s what this guide is.
That’s also a specific thing I can do for you, and it’s a little unusual: I’m a licensed Realtor and a licensed mortgage loan originator. So when I look at an HOA community, I’m reading the resale certificate as your agent and reading the reserve ratio, the delinquency rate, and the warrantability as your lender — at the same time, before you write an offer, instead of finding out three weeks in that the building doesn’t qualify. Most buyers get those two opinions weeks apart from two people who never speak.
Call me at 412-663-3325 with the address and I’ll tell you what I find, either way.
The Knox Team, Home of Pittsburgh’s Pawperty Pros. We rescue a shelter pet for every home sold.