New HOA policies for Rental Properties

[Angie Castro]

Charlotte continues to grow and adapt. As an ever-building city we have to adapt to the new Real Estate Investing panoramas. A lot of out of state rental property investors and even local landlords prefer buying new construction homes that need as little maintenance as possible. Charlotte is a great place to do so. Lately, we have seen more Home Owner associations start to impose rules for landlords. Especially in master planned communities which are quite attractive to investors. 

About 5 years ago, we saw HOAs start to impose a minimum length for leases. Lenient HOAs set that rental leases had to be at least 6 months long where more strict ones set it at 12 months long. This was because there was such an increase on Airbnbs in neighborhoods  and it was creating disturbances. 

Now, HOAs are creating new laws surrounding how many units can a rental property investor own within the same community! Some of my clients have 3 houses in the same community and now are being asked to sell some. Communities such as Berewick a huge master planned community is mandating that you can only own 1 rental property in the community. This has caused big corporations to sell off multiple of their properties in the community. Creekshire Village also adopted this measure and now will only allow investors to have 1 rental property in the community.  Communities like Highland Creek are adopting different measures and requiring that a property MUST be owned for 12 months before it can be a rental. 

This is just to say that please read the CC&Rs of a community before purchasing. Make sure there will be no issues renting the home. Even more so if you already own a property in the same community! A competent investments Real Estate Agent should help you with that!