Amendment procedures

Who has to approve an amendment

A board can adopt a rule or pass a resolution on its own, but it cannot amend the declaration that way. Rules and resolutions sit below the declaration in the document hierarchy, so a lower document can never override a higher one, no matter how the board votes on it. Amending the declaration itself takes a vote of the owners.

The exact percentage of owners required varies by state and by your own declaration, so check both before you bring an amendment forward. Some state statutes set a default threshold that applies only when the declaration is silent, and the declaration is free to set a higher or lower number, or to add a requirement that someone else, such as the declarant or a mortgage holder, also has to sign off. Read your declaration first, then the amendment section, before assuming a simple majority is enough.

Recording the change

An owner vote is not the last step. The amendment has to be recorded with the county land-records office before it has legal effect against people who were not there for the vote, including any owner who buys into the community afterward. Nevada's version of the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act illustrates how this requirement is commonly written:

"The persons executing the amendment shall provide a copy thereof to the association, which shall record it. The amendment must be recorded in the names of the parties and the common-interest community."

Source: Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 116, State of Nevada Legislature

Recording deadlines and procedures vary by state, so confirm your own state's requirement rather than assuming Nevada's timeline applies. What does not vary is the underlying logic: the operative declaration for any property is whatever the recorder's office shows once every recorded amendment is read together with the original, not the copy an owner was handed at closing.

Amendment or restatement?

An amendment changes one provision, or a small number of them, in the document currently in force. A restatement is a different tool: it folds the original declaration together with every amendment adopted since into a single new consolidated document, which is then recorded to replace the whole patchwork. Boards reach for an amendment when only a specific provision needs to change, and consider a restatement once the accumulated amendments have made the documents hard to read or administer as a set.