The method is the holding: read the declaration as a whole

This is what transfers to other Montana communities, and it is a method rather than a result.

A single “residential purposes” clause read in isolation tends toward ambiguity — that is the lesson of Craig Tracts Homeowners' Ass'n v. Brown Drake, LLC, 2020 MT 305, which the district court had relied on to find ambiguity here. The Supreme Court narrowed that reading directly: Craig Tracts “does not render every covenant that uses the term ‘residential’ ambiguous if construing all covenants together consistently makes clear the underlying intent.”

So a declaration that carries a residential-purposes clause plus a commercial-use ban plus a single-family/no-apartment clause plus a nuisance clause plus a stated purpose can be enforced as unambiguous, even with nothing about rentals in it. A declaration carrying only the first of those is in a different position.

Two evidentiary rules a board is held to

• Extrinsic evidence must relate to the making of the covenants. The Court allowed that extrinsic evidence may be consulted to determine whether an instrument is ambiguous, but held it “cannot be used to show that, following the construction of the instrument, the use was of a certain type or subsequently varied from the plain language.” A file full of what owners have actually done since 1990 is of limited value on the construction question.
• Ambiguity is a question of law, breach is for a jury. If ambiguity survives, the free-use-of-property presumption applies and “[i]t would not be appropriate to submit the matter to a jury.” Material breach, by contrast, remains a jury question.

The Court also held the district court erred by grafting a 30-day minimum occupancy requirement onto covenants that contained none — citing § 1-4-101, MCA against inserting omitted language. An association tempted to read a durational rule into a silent declaration should note that the Court refused to do it even while ruling for the neighbours.

A county permit is not a defence

The defendants held a conditional use permit for short-term rentals. It did not matter. Covenants and public permits operate independently in Montana: a permit tells you the county will not object, and says nothing about what the declaration allows. For a Montana board fielding “but the county approved it,” that is the answer — and for an owner, a permit is not clearance.

The companion case on accessory dwelling units

Brandt did not arrive alone. The Court ordered supplemental briefing in Brandt on the intervening decision in Myers v. Kleinhans, 2024 MT 208, 418 Mont. 113, 556 P.3d 529 (Sept. 17, 2024), and reconciled the two. Myers reversed and ordered judgment for neighbours where owners converted a garage into an accessory dwelling unit and rented it on Airbnb: the conversion created “two separate single-family dwellings” on a one-dwelling-per-lot covenant, the ADU not being “under the same roof,” and renting it for profit was unambiguously a “commercial business” under a bare commercial-activity ban — with no durational analysis at all.²

Read together, the two decisions give Montana associations appellate authority on the two most common covenant-versus-rental fact patterns: renting the whole house short-term, and renting an accessory unit.

What is left open, and what to do about fees

Whether any particular Montana declaration reaches short-term rentals remains a document-by-document question. The Court read “the Declaration as a whole,” and the concurrence separately flagged that the “country living” and nuisance theories are fact-intensive jury questions rather than grounds for summary judgment. Nothing here predicts an outcome in any specific community.

On money, one result is worth a board's attention: the neighbours won and still did not get their attorney fees. The declaration's fee clause was permissive — the prevailing party “may recover any damages” — which left the award to the district court's discretion, and the Court found no abuse in denying fees given the genuine confusion Craig Tracts had created. An association budgeting an enforcement action on the assumption that winning pays for it should read its own fee clause first and check whether it says “shall” or “may.”