The new foreclosure rules would not reach this association anyway

There is a second reason Act 715 does not help here, and it is more fundamental than the calendar.

Whitehall Forest East is a condominium association. SB 406's collection reforms — the higher foreclosure threshold, the 60-day notice, the exclusion of fines from the lien calculation, the cap on association bidding, the attorney-fee gate in Section 7 — all amend sections inside Article 6 of Chapter 3 of Title 44, the Property Owners' Association Act.

And O.C.G.A. § 44-3-235(b) provides that the POA Act “shall not apply to associations created pursuant to Article 3 of this chapter, the ‘Georgia Condominium Act.’” A Georgia condominium association's lien and foreclosure provisions sit in Article 3, and no act signed in 2025 or 2026 amended them.³

So even a foreclosure filed against a Georgia condominium owner in February 2027 would proceed under substantially the same rules as this one. The $4,000 threshold, the doubled notice period and the fines exclusion are not available to condominium owners at all.

What the new statute does give a condominium owner

Chapter 43-17A, in full — and that is not nothing.²

Section 43-17A-1(6) defines “owners' association” to include a “condominium development” and associations formed under “Articles 3 and 6 of Chapter 3 of Title 44.” So from 1 January 2027 a Georgia condominium association must register, pay $100 a year, file its governing documents and a financial statement under a year old, name its officers, retain ten years of assessment, fine, fee, lien and foreclosure records at a Georgia office, and submit to examination by the Secretary of State.

Three provisions bear on a dispute like this one:

• § 43-17A-8(a) — payments must be applied to regular assessments first and “other fees and fines” last. This crosses the Article 6 boundary and reaches condominiums.
• § 43-17A-8(b) — the association may not refuse a payment in any amount, and may not accelerate assessments.
• § 43-17A-5 — any person residing in the development may complain to the Secretary of State within 180 days, and the filing stays collection of the disputed fines and fees.

And the registration filing is where the governance allegation would surface: an association whose officers are named annually on a state filing is an association whose officers can be checked.

What Georgia law still does not provide

Three absences bear directly on a case like this, and each was proposed and rejected.

No right of redemption after sale. Sen. Donzella James's SB 107 would have created a 180-day right of redemption following an association foreclosure sale. It died in Senate Economic Development and Tourism. Georgia association foreclosure remains judicial, and once the lot is sold the owner's remedies are the narrow equitable ones — as Hale v. ASBM Investments, LLC showed this year, where an owner established that her sale was conducted by a private individual rather than a sheriff, contrary to O.C.G.A. § 9-13-161(a), and still lost because she had not tendered what she owed.⁴

No hardship abatement. Nothing in Georgia law requires an association to pause assessments for a homeowner in financial distress.

No election requirement. If the president really was never elected, that is a governance failure Chapter 17A will record on a state filing — but Georgia has no statute requiring association elections at all. HB 62 proposed mandatory annual elections, resident-owner directors, minimum board size and a route to contest a result through the Secretary of State. It never left committee.

The route that does exist today

O.C.G.A. § 44-5-60(d)(5) is the provision Georgia owners in this position most often do not know about, and it speaks to exactly this fact pattern.

It lists six governance failures — including failure to appoint directors and elect officers, failure to maintain and produce a director and officer list on written request, failure to call member meetings, and failure to prepare an annual budget and assessment and distribute it within 30 days of the fiscal year's start. After a 30-day cure notice, an owner has standing individually, and not solely through a derivative action, to seek a declaratory judgment granting owners control by ordering an election.

The Court of Appeals construed it in June 2026 in Boaz v. Thirteen Hundred on Lake Nottely Property Owners Association, and the lesson was about precision: the owners lost because they asked for the association to be “dissolved and declared illegal,” which are “remedies for which the statute does not provide.” Ask for the election, and only the election.⁵

What to watch next

The 23 September hearing. Beyond it, the question this case poses for Georgia is one the new statute answers only partially: what happens to a homeowner whose association's authority to act is genuinely in doubt, when the mechanism for testing that authority arrives three months too late.

Chapter 43-17A's 180-day complaint window opens on 1 January 2027 and looks back roughly to July 2026 — so conduct from this autumn will be complainable, even though this foreclosure is not.