The charges that would be in scope if the regulation reaches this industry

Community association management in Massachusetts generates a set of charges that look, structurally, exactly like the fees the regulation targets — charges added to a transaction, disclosed late, and sometimes optional in name only:

• Resale certificate and 6(d) certificate charges. A Massachusetts unit cannot be conveyed clean without a §6(d) certificate stating the assessment position, and management companies charge for producing it. The seller is a captive customer.
• Document production and transfer fees on a sale.
• Amenity and move-in fees.
• Online payment convenience fees charged to owners paying their assessments electronically.
• Late fee stacking — a late fee, an interest charge, an administrative charge and a collection referral fee accumulating on the same delinquency.

Each of those is a fee whose nature, purpose and amount the regulation would require to be disclosed, and where any optionality would have to be stated along with how to avoid it.

Why the answer is genuinely unclear

The regulation reaches a “sale.” Two threshold questions follow, and neither has a published answer.

Is a condominium assessment a sale? An assessment is a statutory and contractual obligation arising from ownership, not a purchase of a product. It is hard to characterise as a sale in the ordinary sense.

Is a management company's charge to a unit owner a sale? This is the stronger case for coverage. A management company charging a seller $250 for a resale certificate is providing a service for a fee in a transaction with that individual — which looks much more like the conduct 940 CMR 38.00 addresses than an assessment does.

The Attorney General's office has taken no published position either way. Whether it regards association-related charges as within the regulation is the question worth pressing, precisely because the c. 93A class action exposure makes an untested reading expensive.

Steps open to a manager or board now

The prudent course does not depend on resolving the legal question, because the disclosure practices the regulation requires are ones a well-run association follows anyway.

• Publish the fee schedule. Every charge a unit owner can incur — resale certificate, document production, late fee, payment convenience fee — with the amount, in one place owners can find.
• State the purpose of each fee, not just its name. “Administrative fee” is the formulation the regulation exists to discourage.
• Identify the free alternative where one exists. If a payment convenience fee applies to card payments but ACH is free, say so at the point of payment, not in a footnote.
• Check the management contract. Many Massachusetts management agreements let the manager charge owners directly for services in addition to the association's management fee. A board that knows and has approved those charges can disclose them.
• Review late fee stacking against the documents. Whether the association may charge a particular late fee at all is a question of the master deed, the trust instrument and c. 183A — separate from, and prior to, any disclosure question.

The adjacent regulation worth checking

The Division of Banks rewrote 209 CMR 18.00, the conduct rules for debt collectors, effective 26 September 2025 — and the provisions were removed and reorganised rather than merely edited.³ Any association collection policy that cites subsection numbers in that chapter needs re-checking against the new text.

Third-party collection agencies retained by associations are licensed debt collectors and squarely covered. Law firms collecting for associations are not required to license — the Division took the opposite view in 2015 and withdrew it on 1 April 2016, leaving the attorney-at-law exemption in 209 CMR 18.02 standing. An association collecting its own assessments in its own name is generally not a “debt collector” under the chapter, though no 2025 or 2026 Division opinion addressing association assessment collection specifically could be located.

What to watch next

Any Attorney General statement, guidance update or enforcement action addressing community association or property management fees. Until one appears, a Massachusetts management company charging owners for documents and payments is operating in an area the regulation plausibly covers, with no published assurance that it does not.