The five-member HOA review board in Georgia's new law does not exist
The five-member HOA review board in Georgia's new law does not exist
2026-09-10 · Georgia · Legislation
What happened. There are two documents called “Senate Bill 406” in public circulation, they describe materially different statutes, and the one the Georgia General Assembly's own website still serves is not the one the Governor signed.
The consequence is that a good deal of Georgia guidance — including material aimed at association boards — describes an adjudicative body that the enacted law does not create.
The two documents
The version at legis.ga.gov, numbered 26 LC 44 3299ER, is an earlier draft.1 Its caption promises “a State Board for Review of Complaints Regarding Property Owners' Associations,” provision “for referees,” and language “to prohibit bidding at foreclosure sales by property owners' associations and related individuals and entities.”
The version signed on 12 May 2026, numbered 26 LC 49 2879S and marked “AS PASSED,” is on the Governor's site.2 Its caption promises registration of “owners' associations,” “an exception,” “a stay of collections of fines or fees,” and “priority of application of payments.”
Set the two side by side and the differences are not stylistic:
- The word “nonregistered” appears four times in the signed act and not once in the draft. The registration opt-out exists only in the enacted law.
- The phrase “State Board for Review” appears in the draft and not once in the signed act.
- O.C.G.A. § 44-7-50 — the dispossessory statute — is amended in the signed act and untouched in the draft.
- The draft's caption promises a ban on association bidding at foreclosure sales. The enacted § 44-3-232(c) expressly preserves the power to bid.
What the board would have been
In the draft, § 43-17A-5 created a State Board for Review of Complaints Regarding Property Owners' Associations: five members who had themselves to be association members, no two from the same association, six-year terms, three appointed by the Governor and one each by the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, with quarterly meetings made available to the public virtually, a 90-day investigation deadline, and a duty to notify the Attorney General and the county sheriff within seven days of a suspected criminal violation.
None of that survived.
What replaced it
On 19 March 2026 the House Judiciary Committee rewrote the bill, stripping the board and substituting a single hearing officer appointed by the Secretary of State — the model now at § 43-17A-5, whose conclusions the parties have 15 days to satisfy before somebody must go to court to enforce them. The substitute also added the three-years-of-financial-documents requirement and the Secretary of State's power to deny, suspend and revoke a registration.
Homeowner advocates objected at the time, and the objection was about impartiality rather than mechanics. Michael Shephard of The WATCH Project told Atlanta News First: “The bill looks great with one glaring exception: we do not have impartiality and we do not have a board.”3
The Senate agreed to the House substitute on 31 March 2026, the same day the House passed it, with no conference committee.4
The arbitration that is promised and never delivered
The second artefact is inside the enacted law itself, and it is stranger.
The caption of the signed act — the official statement of what the Act does, carried through to the version Kemp signed — contains at line 7 the words “to provide for binding arbitration.”
We searched the full extracted text of the signed bill. The string “arbitrat” occurs exactly once, in the caption, and nowhere in the operative text. There is no arbitration mechanism anywhere in Chapter 17A. What the Act actually provides is the hearing-officer process at § 43-17A-5 and a de novo appeal to magistrate or superior court at § 43-17A-6 — which is litigation, not arbitration.
The likeliest explanation is mechanical: the House substitute removed the arbitration provision and the caption was not conformed. But the caption is what a homeowner reads first, and a Georgia owner who opens Act 715 expecting a right to binding arbitration will not find one.
The rights list also changed
A third difference matters to owners specifically. The draft's list of “rights of community association owners” included satellite-dish, American-flag, political-sign and religious-display rights.
The enacted list at § 43-17A-7 drops all four. It runs to twelve items covering records, insurance certificates, meeting notice and attendance, access to common areas and to one's own property, statutory foreclosure process, amendment thresholds, a director's duty of care and conflict disclosure, freedom to determine household composition, and the right to challenge discriminatory practices.
So Georgia did not, in this Act, create statutory flag-display, political-sign or religious-display rights for association members. Any summary saying otherwise is reading the draft.
How to tell which document you are holding
This is a practical problem for Georgia boards and managers reading vendor material this autumn, and there are quick tests.
- Check the LC number in the top-left corner. 26 LC 49 2879S with “AS PASSED” beneath the sponsor list is the law. 26 LC 44 3299ER is not.
- Search for “nonregistered.” Present means enacted; absent means draft.
- Look for a five-member board. If the document you are reading creates one, it is not the law.
- Check whether the summary mentions flag or political-sign rights. Those are draft-only.
Why this is worth a Georgia board's attention
Not as a curiosity. Two of the differences are operationally significant and run in opposite directions.
An association advised from the draft believes there is a five-member board of association members hearing complaints, with a criminal-referral duty attached. The reality is a hearing officer appointed by, and inside, the Secretary of State's office, with an automatic stay on collections that the draft's version did not carry in the same form.
And an association advised from the draft does not know that the registration opt-out at § 43-17A-2(a)(2)(B) exists at all — which is the single largest structural decision the Act asks a Georgia board to make before January.
What to watch next
Whether legis.ga.gov's SB 406 page is updated to serve the enacted text. Until it is, the Governor's signed-legislation library is the only public source for what Georgia actually enacted, and anyone writing about Act 715 from the legislature's own website is describing a bill that did not become law.
Related Georgia HOA Topics
- Senate Bill 406, superseded draft (26 LC 44 3299ER) — Georgia General Assembly ↩
- Senate Bill 406, as passed (26 LC 49 2879S) — signed copy, Office of the Governor ↩
- “House makes major changes to proposed HOA oversight bill” — Atlanta News First, 19 March 2026 ↩
- 2026 Composite Status Report, Session Final, Georgia House of Representatives (14 May 2026) ↩
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