The gap between the two regulators

Georgia's new community-association statute regulates the association. The Real Estate Commission regulates the manager. From 1 January 2027 those two regimes operate side by side with no coordination clause between them.

Chapter 43-17A contains no manager licensing provision and no requirement that an association verify its manager's licence. It reaches management companies only incidentally, in two places:²

• § 43-17A-2(g): “The property owners' association or property management company shall notify the Secretary of State of the address of the office at which such records are kept” — so where the manager holds the records, the manager's office goes on a state filing.
• § 43-17A-2(a)(2)(A): no association “or its agent” may collect fines or fees, record liens or start foreclosures unless the association is registered.

So a Georgia manager will be executing a registration regime enforced against their client by an agency that does not license them — while GREC, which does license them, made no manager-specific rule change in the entire 2025-2026 period. Its only adopted rules for the window were two broker continuing-education rules effective 1 July 2025.³

GREC also publishes discipline only as two rolling PDFs of current suspensions and revocations, with no date-stamped case list and no manager filter. There is no straightforward way for a Georgia board to check whether a given manager has been disciplined.

What a board can actually do about its manager

This case is a control failure, not a legal novelty, and the controls are unglamorous.

• Verify the licence, in writing, annually. Not at engagement — annually. The Cartwright revocation came in May 2025; an association checking in June 2025 would have found it.
• Insist on separate trust accounts. Association funds should sit in an account in the association's name, with the association's tax identification number, not commingled in a manager's operating or pooled account.
• Keep a board member as a signatory or read-only viewer on every account. This is the single most effective control available and it costs nothing. A treasurer with online read access sees a balance that stops moving.
• Reconcile monthly against the bank, not against the manager's report. The report is produced by the party you are checking.
• Confirm the tax and insurance payments actually cleared. Clients here reported unpaid property taxes on managed homes — a failure invisible in a summary statement.
• Get the fidelity bond right, and make sure it covers the manager. A bond that covers only board members does not respond when the manager is the problem.

What the new records duty adds

From 1 January 2027, § 43-17A-2(g) requires an association to maintain, for not less than ten years at an office in Georgia, all records relating to any assessments, fines, fees, liens and foreclosures. Section 43-17A-2(f) makes them subject to examination by the Secretary of State.

For an association that loses its manager abruptly — a licence revocation, a criminal case, a collapse — the practical value of that duty is that the records are the association's obligation, not the vendor's. A board that has never had possession of ten years of assessment records is a board that cannot comply, and cannot reconstruct what happened to its money.

For boards changing managers, records transfer is the central term of the transition, not an afterthought. The Georgia Court of Appeals showed this year what missing records cost: in Ovation Condominium Association v. Cox, an association lost summary judgment because it could produce maintenance records for only four years of a twenty-one-year-old installation.

The scale question

Eighteen police reports across six counties is the number worth sitting with. It suggests a pattern that ran for a considerable period across a substantial book of business before anything happened — and that each individual client, seeing one missing payment, had no way to know the others existed.

There is no Georgia mechanism that would have aggregated those complaints. The Secretary of State's new complaint process at § 43-17A-5 will not fix it either: it takes complaints about associations, from people residing in the development, not complaints about management companies from their client boards.

What to watch next

The Gwinnett prosecution, and whether the other five counties bring their own charges. For Georgia boards the more useful thing to watch is whether the Secretary of State's Chapter 43-17A rulemaking says anything about management companies at all — the statute leaves that space almost entirely empty, and the rulemaking is the only near-term opportunity to fill it.