Michigan HOAs with pre-1950 declarations have until September 29, 2027 to save their covenants
Michigan HOAs with pre-1950 declarations have until September 29, 2027 to save their covenants
2026-09-12 · Michigan · Compliance
What happened. Michigan rewrote the Marketable Record Title Act on 29 September 2025, and in doing so drew a line through the state's homeowners associations. 2025 PA 13 — House Bill 4524, sponsored by Reps. Doug Wozniak (R-59) and Kelly Breen (D-21), passed 105–0 in the House and 35–0 in the Senate and given immediate effect on signing1 — permanently protects most association documents and leaves the oldest ones on a two-year clock.
Who is safe, permanently
Section 4(1) of the amended act carries two carve-outs that between them cover the overwhelming majority of Michigan associations:
- (h) the act cannot extinguish “any interest created by a recorded master deed for a condominium or any recorded amendments to a recorded master deed.” Every Michigan condominium is out, with no filing to make and no date to diarise.
- (g) the act cannot extinguish any interest created by a declaration or other recorded instrument “executed and recorded on or after January 1, 1950… that subjects the land to any use or other restriction or obligation.”
Who is not
An HOA whose declaration of restrictions was recorded before 1 January 1950. For those, PA 13 replaced the old fixed deadline with a rolling one: an interest may be preserved by recording a notice of claim “not later than 2 years after the effective date of the amendatory act that added section 5a” — which places the deadline at 29 September 2027.
Michigan has a real population of these. Pre-war platted subdivisions in Grosse Pointe, Birmingham, Highland Park, Royal Oak, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and the older Detroit neighbourhoods commonly run on declarations recorded in the 1910s through the 1940s, and many of the associations enforcing them today are informal or were incorporated decades after the covenants were written.
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