Why this proposition is worth a Missouri owner's attention

Most people assume a covenant dispute goes to a courtroom. If the reported holding is accurate, in a Missouri condominium whose declaration contains an arbitration clause, it may not — and the binding agreement was made by taking the deed, not by signing anything.

That is not an exotic proposition. Recorded covenants in Missouri are treated as private contracts running with the land: the Supreme Court of Missouri said so in January 2026, describing restrictive covenants as “private contractual obligations.” An arbitration clause inside such an instrument is a contract term like any other, and an owner takes subject to the whole document.

What follows for a board and for an owner is largely practical.

For a board

1. Find out whether the declaration contains an arbitration clause at all. Many Missouri condominium declarations drafted from national forms do. Many older Missouri subdivision indentures do not. A board that does not know cannot advise anyone, including itself.
2. Read its scope language precisely. “Any matter arising under the declarations” is broad and reportedly reached a parking dispute. A clause limited to construction defects, or to disputes between the association and the declarant, reaches far less. The clause's own words decide it.
3. Understand what arbitration costs and does not deliver. It is not automatically cheaper for a small covenant dispute, the arbitrator's fees are real, and there is effectively no appeal — the statutory grounds for vacating an award are narrow, which is exactly what this case illustrates. An association that pushes a dispute to arbitration and loses has very little recourse.
4. Do not draft an arbitration clause into an amendment casually. Where a board is amending governing documents, adding mandatory arbitration binds every current and future owner. That is a significant allocation of rights and it deserves a deliberate decision, not a form paragraph.
5. Tell buyers. The resale disclosure is the moment a prospective owner can actually read the clause. A Missouri condominium's resale package is governed by the Condominium Property Act's reserve and document disclosure requirements; an arbitration obligation is the kind of thing a buyer will say later that nobody mentioned.

For an owner

The consequence is that an arbitration demand under a declaration is not something to ignore on the theory that no contract was signed. If the reported holding is right, the ownership is the consent. An owner who wants to contest arbitrability has to do it at the outset, not after an award, because by then the grounds for vacating are narrow and the argument that no agreement existed is the one this decision rejected.

The Missouri context that makes this matter more than it would elsewhere

Missouri has no general planned-community statute and no agency that regulates associations. There is no statutory dispute-resolution track, no ombudsman, and no administrative complaint route. The 2026 attempt at a comprehensive framework — which included both binding arbitration and a non-binding dispute-resolution track — died in committee, as its predecessors did in 2025, 2024 and 2017.

So the dispute-resolution architecture for a Missouri association is whatever the recorded instrument says, and nothing else. Where the instrument says arbitration, arbitration is the architecture. Where it says nothing, litigation is — into a court system where, as of 28 August 2026, an association suing a member over public criticism faces a 60-day dismissal motion with mandatory fee-shifting under the new Uniform Public Expression Protection Act.

That combination is worth sitting with. The cheapest routes available to a Missouri board are the ones written into its own documents decades ago, and most boards have never audited them.

A correction worth flagging

Several search engines attach this condominium-arbitration holding to docket number ED113258. That is wrong — ED113258 is a post-conviction case. The condominium-arbitration case on the same hand-down page is Haack v. Jarvis, No. WD88062. If a board has been handed a summary citing the wrong docket, the summary is unreliable on more than the number.

What we have not verified

We did not read the opinion, and no verbatim quotation from it appears in this article. The exact filing date, the published or precedential status, and whether a motion for rehearing or an application for transfer was filed are all unconfirmed. A board or owner whose own facts resemble this one should have counsel obtain No. WD88062 from the court before relying on anything here.

What to watch next

Whether a Missouri appellate court takes up arbitrability under an association declaration with a fuller opinion. This one, as reported, answers the narrow question of whether ownership supplies consent. It does not tell anyone how a Missouri court would read a narrower clause, or what happens where the declaration was amended to add arbitration after an owner bought.