2026-09-09 · Arkansas · Regulation

Arkansas spent 2025 and 2026 building a licensing regime for property managers. It does not cover the people who manage homeowners associations. Act 392 of 2025 created a property management broker licence and a property management associate licence, and the Real Estate Commission threaded them through some forty existing rules. Across the Act's full text, the words “homeowner,” “owners association,” “condominium,” “horizontal,” “common interest,” “community association” and “assessment” appear zero times between them.¹

That is worth stating plainly, because a good deal of what circulates online about Arkansas HOA regulation says the opposite.

What Act 392 actually licenses

The Act, introduced as HB1558, adds a definition at Ark. Code Ann. § 17-42-103(12). A “property management broker” is someone who, for compensation, “engages in the business of leasing, renting, or subleasing real estate located in this state on behalf of an owner, lessor, or potential lessee” and who does any of fourteen enumerated things.

Read the fourteen. They are, without exception, about tenants: promoting or conducting the leasing of real estate; negotiating leases; procuring tenants; aiding a person in locating real estate for lease; advertising real property for lease; showing rental or leased properties to potential tenants; acting as liaison between owners and a tenant; overseeing “the inspection, maintenance, and upkeep of leased real estate belonging to others”; and collecting rents.

Collecting assessments from members, maintaining common area owned by an association, running an annual meeting, enforcing covenants, preparing a reserve budget — the actual work of community-association management — appear nowhere in the statute.

The pattern holds through the implementing rules. The Commission's amendments to 17 C.A.R. Part 220 run to 234 pages, and across the whole document there is not one reference to a homeowners association, a condominium, a horizontal property regime, a community association or a common-interest community. New rule 220-1016 defines an “Occupant” as one who rents nightly and a “Tenant” as one who rents otherwise; new rule 220-1017 requires a written agreement, with ten mandatory terms, before managing “residential rental real estate.”²

Even the exam confirms it. The Property Management Broker Examination Content Outline, effective July 1, 2026, has 75 scored items covering Commission powers, licensing, agency and disclosure, contract law, fair housing, landlord-tenant law, trust accounts, property management mathematics and supervision. There is no HOA, condominium or assessment topic on it.³

1. Act 392 of 2025 (HB1558), An Act to Amend the Law Concerning the Arkansas Real Estate Commission; To Create a Property Management Broker and Property Management Associate License — enrolled text ↩
2. Arkansas Real Estate Commission, Property Management Licensing and Administration Rules amending 17 C.A.R. Part 220 (234 pp.) ↩
3. Arkansas Real Estate Examination Handbook, including the Property Management Broker Examination Content Outline effective July 1, 2026 ↩
4. Arkansas Real Estate Commission, Complaint Procedures — statement of the Commission's jurisdiction ↩
5. Arkansas Fair Housing Commission — housing discrimination complaint intake ↩