SJC: signatures on a petition are enough to prove majority support for a resident purchase
SJC: signatures on a petition are enough to prove majority support for a resident purchase
2026-09-10 · Massachusetts · Courts
What happened. The Supreme Judicial Court upheld a manufactured housing resident association's exercise of its statutory right of first refusal, holding that resident signatures on a petition are sufficient “reasonable evidence” that at least 51 percent of tenants support the association's purchase.
Crown Communities, LLC v. Austin, docket SJC-13841, was decided 5 June 2026.1
The dispute
- The property is the Park at Pocasset, a manufactured housing community in Bourne.
- The Charles W. Austin Trust had a $3.8 million purchase-and-sale agreement with Crown Communities.
- The Pocasset Park Association moved to match it, exercising the residents' right of first refusal.
The evidentiary holding
The requisite “reasonable evidence” of majority support includes tenants' signatures on a petition approving the association's purchase. That is a low, workable threshold, and it is the holding that gives the decision its practical value — a resident association operating under time pressure can now document majority support without a formal balloting process.
The Chapter 93A holding
The association also brought counterclaims under G.L. c. 93A §11 over Crown's outreach to residents. The SJC rejected them. Crown had offered $50 gift cards and $5,000 remodeling credits, and had made factually incorrect statements that residents would lose rent-control rights under association ownership.
None of that was unfair or deceptive, because the statements were made in good faith and the inducements were legitimate competitive conduct.
The procedural history
Jury-waived trial in August 2022 for Crown; the Appeals Court vacated in December 2024; the trial court reversed itself for the association in March 2025; the SJC took the case on direct appellate review, argued 2 March 2026.
Why a manufactured housing case matters to condominium and HOA readers
Two reasons, and the second is the more important one.
The 93A holding is not confined to manufactured housing. It is a statement about when competitive conduct in a real estate acquisition crosses into unfairness or deception. That a competing buyer made factually incorrect statements to residents about their legal rights, and still did not violate §11 because the statements were made in good faith, is a meaningful narrowing of 93A exposure in acquisition disputes generally.
For a condominium association, the analogous fact pattern is a bulk buyer or a termination proponent making claims to owners about what will happen to their rights. Crown Communities suggests that the remedy for inaccurate advocacy in that setting is counter-advocacy, not a 93A claim — unless bad faith can be shown.
The evidence holding is a template. Resident and owner groups organising to act collectively, on a deadline, rarely have the apparatus for a formal vote. A court accepting signatures on a petition as reasonable evidence of majority support is a practical accommodation that other collective-action contexts will cite.
What the residents actually had to overcome
It is worth being clear-eyed about what this litigation cost. The community exercised a right of first refusal in a $3.8 million transaction, lost at trial in 2022, won a vacatur in the Appeals Court in December 2024, won on remand in March 2025, and then defended a direct appellate review in the SJC decided in June 2026.
That is nearly four years of litigation to enforce a statutory right that exists precisely because residents are the party with the least capacity to litigate. Any reading of this decision as a straightforward win should account for the timeline.
The Massachusetts context
Manufactured housing communities occupy an unusual position in Massachusetts law: residents own their homes but not the land, which produces a governance structure with some features of a common-interest community and some of a landlord-tenant relationship. The right of first refusal exists to give residents a route to ownership when the land changes hands.
The state's condominium law contains no equivalent. There is no unit owner right of first refusal when a bulk owner sells, and the condominium statute's collective-action provisions run in the other direction — toward what a supermajority of owners can do to a dissenting minority, as c. 183A §18 does for improvements and §17 does after a casualty.
Operationally, for a resident or owner group
- Document support contemporaneously and in writing. Dated signatures, clearly stating what is being approved, are now confirmed as sufficient evidence.
- Expect the competing buyer to compete. Gift cards, credits and direct outreach to residents are, on this decision, legitimate. So is advocacy that turns out to be wrong, absent bad faith.
- Do not plan around a 93A recovery. The counterclaims failed on facts that many would have expected to succeed. Treat 93A as a remedy for genuine bad faith, not as leverage.
A note on the date
The court's own 2026 decision listing gives 5 June 2026, and that is the date used here. At least one commentator has published 11 June 2026, which is most likely a publication artifact rather than a second decision. Anyone citing the case in a filing should confirm against the slip opinion.
What to watch next
Whether the 93A reasoning migrates. The most consequential sentence in the decision is that good faith saves a factually incorrect statement in a competitive acquisition. Massachusetts 93A practice is broad and creative, and a limit of that kind, articulated by the SJC, tends to be tested quickly in adjacent contexts — including condominium termination and bulk-purchase disputes, where the same dynamics arise.
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