Georgia covenant communities get a new 80% route into the POA Act
Georgia covenant communities get a new 80% route into the POA Act
2026-09-10 · Georgia · Legislation
What happened. Three sections of the Georgia Property Owners' Bill of Rights Act have nothing to do with registration or complaints. Sections 3, 4 and 6 rewrite how a Georgia covenant community becomes governed by the Property Owners' Association Act — and cap the vote it takes to amend the declaration afterwards. All take effect 1 January 2027.1
For Georgia, this is a bigger structural change than it looks, because of what the POA Act does: it rescues covenants from the twenty-year expiry rule in O.C.G.A. § 44-5-60 and supplies a statutory lien, a foreclosure mechanism and amendment machinery that common-law covenant communities simply do not have.
The third route in
Before this Act, a Georgia development came under the POA Act in one of two ways: the original declaration was recorded under the Act, or a recorded declaration was amended under § 44-3-235(a)(2) to submit to it. Section 6 adds a third, at new § 44-3-235(a)(3):
“This article shall also apply to any association of owners subject to a recorded declaration of covenants upon property, which covenants are administered by an owners' association in which membership is mandatory for all owners of lots in the development subject to such declaration, where 80 percent of the association vote to approve the submission of such association to this article and records an instrument certifying such vote. Such instrument shall give notice that the recordation of the instrument subjects the association to the provisions of this article.”
Section 3 then amends § 44-3-222 so that a property owners' development comes into existence on “the recordation of an instrument pursuant to paragraph (3) of subsection (a) of Code Section 44-3-235” as well as by the two older routes.
The requirement is mandatory membership. A voluntary Georgia neighbourhood association — the kind where dues are optional — cannot use this door.
The amendment threshold, capped at 80%
Section 4 rewrites § 44-3-226(b). The general rule stays: no amendment may require the approval of more than 80 percent of the association vote and mortgagees holding 80 percent of the voting interest of mortgaged lots.
What is new is paragraph (2), a one-year window for associations coming in by the new route. Where such an association's declaration requires a majority in excess of 80 percent to amend, that higher requirement survives only if, “by the first anniversary of the date of submission, the association and those mortgagees permitted to vote on amendments vote to retain the requirements by a majority” — and if no such vote occurs, provisions requiring more than 80 percent “shall be deemed to only require 80 percent of the voting interest.”
A community with a 90 percent or unanimous amendment clause that submits under the new route and then does nothing for a year finds that clause reduced to 80 percent by operation of law.
Where this came from
These three sections are not new drafting. They are, substantively, House Bill 664 — “Property owners' associations; development and affirmative election; provisions” — which passed the House by committee substitute on 3 March 2026, was read in the Senate the next day, went to Senate Judiciary and died there at sine die.2 The bill is dead; its text is Georgia law.
Why an 80% vote is worth more in Georgia than elsewhere
The value of getting into the POA Act turns on a distinctively Georgian problem: O.C.G.A. § 44-5-60, under which covenants restricting land in subdivisions run for twenty years and, outside the POA Act, cannot simply be renewed by a board that would like them to continue.
The Georgia Court of Appeals worked through exactly this in Vaughn v. Windfield Homeowners Association, Inc., No. A24A1751 (Ga. Ct. App. 21 Feb. 2025). The court began from first principles — “the general rule is that the owner of land has the right to use it for any lawful purpose,” and restrictions “cannot be imposed without the owner's consent” — and then identified the exception: “there is an exception to this rule when a homeowners association is ‘created pursuant to or submitted to’ the Act. OCGA § 44-3-234.”3
In Vaughn, a 1987 declaration that was not a “declaration” within the POA Act's definition was nonetheless amended by its own majority-vote clause into a mandatory-membership association that then submitted to the Act — and the new short-term-rental ban bound an owner who had voted against it. The court rejected the contrary reading because it “would lead to the nonsensical result that no homeowners association could avail itself of the Act if its original declaration of covenants did not satisfy the statutory definition of ‘declaration.’”
New § 44-3-235(a)(3) puts a clean statutory route where Vaughn had to reason its way to one.
The trade-off for a Georgia board
Submitting is not free, and from January it carries a new cost the drafters of HB 664 did not have in view.
The upside. Covenants escape the twenty-year clock. The association gets the POA Act's automatic statutory lien for assessments, its judicial foreclosure mechanism, its statutory authority for late charges and interest, and its amendment machinery. Owners get the statutory protections in the same article — including, from January, the rewritten § 44-3-232(c) foreclosure threshold and the Section 7 attorney-fee gate.
The cost that is new. An association that submits is unambiguously inside Chapter 17A as an association “formed pursuant to… Articles 3 and 6 of Chapter 3 of Title 44.” It is registering with the Secretary of State, paying $100 a year, holding ten years of records at a Georgia office and exposed to the complaint process. A community that has drifted along on unenforceable expired covenants may find that submission trades one problem for a compliance programme.
The supermajority trap. Paragraph (2) of the amended § 44-3-226(b) requires an affirmative act within one year to preserve a higher amendment threshold, and the act required is itself a vote — of the association and of the mortgagees permitted to vote on amendments. Communities that submit and then let the anniversary pass will have altered their own governing document by inaction.
What it means for owners in the minority
Worth stating plainly, because it is the part homeowners find hardest. An 80 percent vote can bring a Georgia community under a statute that makes covenants perpetual and gives the association a foreclosable lien — over the objection of up to a fifth of the owners. Vaughn confirms that the dissenting owner is bound.
The counterweight in the same Act is real but indirect: the community that submits is also the community that must register, retain records and answer complaints to the Secretary of State.
What to watch next
How many Georgia communities actually use the new route, and when. The rational sequence for a board that wants POA Act protection is to submit and then hold the retention vote inside twelve months — but every association weighing that decision in 2027 will be doing so with a state registration obligation on the other side of the ledger, which is a calculation nobody was making when HB 664 was drafted.
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