Certified mail is necessary but not sufficient

The delivery rule is the one most likely to produce a defective notice. Delinquency notices must go by certified mail, return-receipt requested, plus two of three further channels: telephone, text message, or email.

That obliges the association to hold contact details it may never have collected. The act requires the association to “periodically request from a unit owner — or the unit owner's designated contact — a telephone number, a cellular number, and an email address.” If the owner does not supply them, the association may fall back to regular mail — but still must send by certified mail, return-receipt requested.

The Division flags the gap on the face of the statute: “The Act does not specify how long the owner has to provide contact information to the association.” An association that asks once, hears nothing, and proceeds is operating in an undefined space. Asking on a schedule, and recording that you asked, is the cheap answer.

The nine-month sale delay, and what it is for

The provision that gives the act its name lets an owner facing HOA foreclosure file a court motion to delay the sale for up to nine months, during which the owner may sell the home at market value rather than lose it at auction. The association must also give the owner notice of the right to credit counselling at least thirty days before initiating foreclosure.

The reason the legislature reached for equity protection specifically is documented. Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica analysed a database of more than 2,400 HOA-initiated foreclosure cases filed between January 1, 2018 and February 28, 2022, and reported that at least 215 ended in sheriff's sales where the homeowner lost possession — with roughly 450 HOAs filing more than 730 foreclosure cases between April 2020 and July 2021, a period when many mortgage lenders were under COVID-era moratoriums. The Colorado Sun separately reported an Aurora home HOA-foreclosed and auctioned in 2021 for $5,000 on a debt of $4,889.31, and resold on the open market about six months later for $420,000.

The compliance precondition boards underestimate

Before pursuing foreclosure of an association lien for money owed plus collection costs or attorney fees, the association must be in compliance with HOA lien and foreclosure law and with the applicable lien and foreclosure provisions of its own declaration, bylaws, articles, and rules and regulations.

That is a self-audit requirement dressed as a precondition. An association whose declaration sets out a notice sequence its manager has not followed for years is not in compliance with its own documents, and the statute now makes that a gate on the remedy rather than a defence to be raised later. Note also that HB25-1043 introduced a sixty-five percent owner-approval element in the foreclosure-authorisation context, which sits alongside the separate sixty-five percent threshold HB25-1272 set for construction-defect actions — two different votes, from two different 2025 acts, easily confused.

It is also now a data call

From October 1, 2025 the state's annual HOA registration asks four mandatory questions covering the twelve months before registration or renewal: the number of owners six or more calendar months delinquent; the number against whom the association or its designee obtained a judgment; the number of payment plans entered into under C.R.S. 38-33.3-316.3; and the number of foreclosure actions filed under C.R.S. 38-33.3-316.

An association that has never tracked those four numbers has a data problem before it has a legal one — and because the aggregate is published, the 2026 reporting year will produce Colorado's first official statewide figures on HOA foreclosure activity.

What to watch next

The Division of Real Estate has no jurisdiction to enforce any of this; it registers, educates and reports. The enforcement is in the courts and, indirectly, in CCIOA's suspension of an unregistered association's right to enforce a lien at all. Watch the 2026 annual report for the first published delinquency and foreclosure counts, and watch whether the state's foreclosure complaint volume moves — the 2025 report recorded 117 complaints in the excessive assessments, fees, fines, collections and foreclosure category, against 3 on liens.