What the pattern shows

Nine bills, two favourable committee reports, zero floor votes. Read alongside the fate of the larger measures, a consistent picture emerges of how Georgia handled HOA legislation in this biennium.

The chamber was willing to pass one HOA bill. Everything else — whether it went further than SB 406 or not as far, whether it was Democratic or bipartisan — was left in committee or in Rules. This is not evidence of hostility to the subject; the eventual vote was 155-10. It is evidence of a leadership decision to consolidate rather than legislate piecemeal.

That has a consequence for reading Act 715 correctly: the statute Georgia passed is not the sum of what its legislature wanted. It is the single vehicle that carried whatever could be agreed.

The election bill nobody talks about

HB 62 deserves separate attention, because its subject is the one substantial gap in the enacted law.

Georgia's new Chapter 17A says almost nothing about how association boards are elected. Section 43-17A-7 gives owners the right to notice of members' meetings and to attend meetings “which shall be called and held by the board of directors at least annually,” and the right to amend governing documents at the applicable thresholds. That is the whole of it.

There is no requirement of annual elections as opposed to annual meetings, no one-vote-per-lot rule, no minimum board size, no ballot or proxy standard, and no route to contest an election result.

HB 62 proposed all five. It never received a hearing.

The gap matters because Georgia's documented governance failures are frequently election failures. Reporting in this period described a Dacula community where residents said there had been no board elections in a decade and most members were appointed rather than elected, and a DeKalb condominium association whose president residents said was self-appointed, having been vice-president when his predecessor was removed. Neither situation is addressed by anything in Act 715 — though from January, a resident of either could complain to the Secretary of State about it.

What did survive, in a different bill

Two of this cluster's ideas made it into law by another route, and it is worth crediting them.

Written notice before fees attach. HB 1221's subject arrived as Section 7 of SB 406: certified-mail notice identifying outstanding fines or delinquent fees, 30 days from receipt to pay, and an itemised list of attorney's fees claimed — in force since 1 July 2026.

Records access. HB 1251's subject arrived, partially, as § 43-17A-7(1), which names the finalised balance sheet, budget, profit and loss statements and bank statements for the past three years.

What did not arrive is the account-statement timing rule. HB 512 would have required a statement of account within ten business days; HB 1222 would have provided for statements of account generally. Georgia's existing mechanism — § 44-3-232(d), under which an association that fails to furnish a statement within five business days of a qualifying request extinguishes its lien as against that purchaser or lender — is unchanged, and applies only in the resale and refinance context, not to an owner simply asking what they owe.

What to watch next

HB 1221 and HB 1222 are the most likely of this group to return in 2027, for a procedural reason: both were favourably reported by substantive committees in February 2026, which means a committee has already examined and approved the drafting. A sponsor refiling either in January starts with a bill that has cleared committee scrutiny once, even though the biennium reset means it must do so again.

HB 62's election provisions are the ones most worth watching on the merits, because the enacted statute's silence on elections is the clearest remaining gap in Georgia association governance law.