Arkansas licensed property managers this year — and left HOA managers out of it
Arkansas licensed property managers this year — and left HOA managers out of it
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
So who does regulate an Arkansas HOA? Almost nobody
Arkansas has no community association manager licence. It has no HOA registry, no common-interest-community commission, no ombudsman, and no chapter of administrative code governing associations. There is no Arkansas analogue to Florida's Division of Condominiums or Nevada's CIC Ombudsman.
The Real Estate Commission's own complaint page draws its jurisdictional line explicitly: it accepts complaints against licensed brokers, licensed salespersons and time-share developers, and its authority is “limited to the content of the Arkansas Real Estate License Law, the Arkansas Time-Share Act and Commission Regulations.” Complaints outside that scope “may be dismissed without investigation.”4
Widely-copied web claims that AREC “oversees the regulation of HOAs in regards to financial management” and can “investigate any complaints regarding potential misappropriation of HOA funds” are not correct, and are contradicted by the Commission's published statement of its own authority. Advice to report an Arkansas HOA fee dispute to the Attorney General, the FTC or the CFPB is similarly unsupported: the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division enforces the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and its published description of its jurisdiction does not list homeowners associations.
The one agency that can act — and its limits
There is a real exception, and it is narrow. The Arkansas Fair Housing Commission is a live state agency that enforces the Arkansas Fair Housing Act and works alongside HUD. It can investigate an HOA, hold an administrative hearing against one, and litigate — because an association is a housing provider.
Its jurisdiction is discrimination only. It reaches a refused disability accommodation, a discriminatory rule, a discriminatory pattern of enforcement. It does not reach an assessment dispute, a covenant fight, a contested board election, or a refused records request. Notably, the Fair Housing Commission now appears as its own tested topic on the new property management broker exam.5
The accurate summary for an Arkansas owner is this: Arkansas has no HOA regulator. The only state agency that can act against an Arkansas HOA is the Fair Housing Commission, and only for housing discrimination. Everything else — assessments, liens, covenants, elections, records — is a private matter for the circuit court of the county where the property sits.
What it changes in practice
For management companies. A firm that both manages associations and leases units for individual owners needs a licence for the leasing. The association work is not the licensed activity. A firm doing association work only is outside the regime entirely — which also means outside its trust-account rules, its complaint process and its $25,000 recovery fund.
For boards hiring a manager. There is no state licence to check, no disciplinary register to search, and no regulator to complain to if the money goes missing. Diligence has to be done privately — references, audited financials, fidelity bonding, control of the association's bank accounts — because no public body is doing it for you. That makes the association's own budget and financial controls the only real safeguard.
For owners. The practical answer to “who do I report my HOA to” in Arkansas is: the circuit court, or the Fair Housing Commission if the complaint is about discrimination. Time and money spent filing elsewhere is time and money spent on nothing.
What to watch next
Two timing points. Act 392 § 40 required the Commission's initial rules to be filed with the Secretary of State on or before June 1, 2026; the comment period ran April 10 to May 11, 2026, with a hearing on May 12 in Little Rock, and the exam content outlines took effect July 1, 2026. We have not located a document stating a single effective date for the amended Part 220 rules, so this column is not asserting one.
The larger question is whether the General Assembly ever extends licensing to community-association management. It did not do so when it had the subject open in 2025, and the 2026 session was a fiscal session in which substantive legislation was not on the table. The next opportunity is the regular session that convenes in January 2027.
Related Arkansas HOA Topics
- 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 ↩
- Arkansas Real Estate Commission, Property Management Licensing and Administration Rules amending 17 C.A.R. Part 220 (234 pp.) ↩
- Arkansas Real Estate Examination Handbook, including the Property Management Broker Examination Content Outline effective July 1, 2026 ↩
- Arkansas Real Estate Commission, Complaint Procedures — statement of the Commission's jurisdiction ↩
- Arkansas Fair Housing Commission — housing discrimination complaint intake ↩
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