Nebraska licenses nobody to run your HOA
Nebraska licenses nobody to run your HOA
2026-09-12 · Nebraska · Regulation
A Nebraska association can hand its money, its records and its enforcement authority to a management company that holds no state credential of any kind, answers to no state regulator, and has no continuing-education requirement. This is not an oversight anyone is fixing. It is the settled position, confirmed against the statutes and the Real Estate Commission's own registration list.
What the Commission actually registers
The Nebraska Real Estate Commission's specialized registration authority covers exactly four categories: sub-divided land, retirement divisions and communities, time-share, and exchange programs.1 Community association management is not among them, and there is no separate manager register.
Why the broker statute does not catch it either
The definition of a broker at Neb. Rev. Stat. § 81-885.01 reaches a person who, for compensation, negotiates “the listing, sale, purchase, exchange, rent, lease, or option for any real estate… or collects rents or attempts to collect rents.”2
Read the last clause carefully, because the whole question turns on it. The statute reaches rents. Assessments are not rents. A manager who administers covenants, prepares budgets, runs meetings, keeps the books, issues violation notices and collects assessments is not collecting rents, and is therefore not performing a licensed activity.
The exemptions at § 81-885.04 confirm the shape of it from the other direction: they exempt resident apartment managers and employees of a licensed broker managing rental property.3 There is no exemption for association managers, because none is needed — they were never inside the Act.
What that means in practice
There is no state body a Nebraska owner can complain to about their management company as such. A licensed real estate professional in this state is subject to Commission discipline, and the Commission publishes its disciplinary actions; its most recent newsletter records no association-management cases, which is unsurprising given that association management is outside its jurisdiction.
Where the Attorney General's consumer-protection authority reaches deceptive practices generally, it has produced no Nebraska HOA or property-management enforcement action in 2025 or 2026, and no Attorney General opinion in that period touches homeowners associations, condominiums, covenants or nonprofit corporations.
Nor does the gap get filled elsewhere. The Department of Banking and Finance's 2025–2026 activity is bank branch matters; nothing in it touches escrow or association funds. The state's Collection Agency Licensing Board page has not been updated since 2019, and no 2025–2026 change to collection-agency licensing affecting a firm an association might retain was found.
So the contract is the regulation
That is the operative consequence, and it puts the work on the board. A Nebraska management agreement is doing a job that in other states is shared with a licensing regime. Provisions worth confirming are in yours:
Where the money sits. Association funds in a separate account in the association's name and tax identification number, not commingled, not in the manager's operating account, with the association as owner of the account and the manager as signatory.
Who can move it, and how much. A stated limit above which board approval is required, and dual signatures on anything material. Fidelity bond or crime coverage naming the association, in an amount related to the funds actually held, with the manager's employees covered.
Who owns the records. Books, minutes, owner ledgers, contracts, plans and the association's correspondence belong to the association, and the agreement should say they are delivered within a stated number of days of termination without condition. A manager holding records against a fee dispute is the commonest way this relationship goes badly.
What the manager may do alone. Filing a lien, retaining counsel, initiating collection proceedings and imposing charges are board decisions. An agreement delegating them wholesale delegates the board's judgment along with the task.
Who is getting paid what. Disclosure of any compensation the manager receives from vendors, insurers or collection firms it recommends. There is no state rule requiring this, so it exists only if the contract creates it.
What happens at the end. Notice period, transition obligations, and a final accounting.
A related point boards conflate
Whether an individual holds a CAI professional designation is a private credential, not a state licence, and conveying it as a licence is misleading. Nebraska has no CAI chapter of its own; the Community Associations Institute services this state through its Heartland chapter and reports that roughly 107,000 Nebraskans live in about 42,400 homes across nearly 2,000 community associations.4 Designations are real and worth something. They are not regulation.
What to watch next
Watch whether manager licensing ever appears in a Nebraska bill. It has not: across the 109th Legislature's 1,262 introduced bills, the Legislature's own subject index lists exactly three under homeowners associations, and none concerns management. A state that has not passed a planned-community act is a long way from licensing the people who run the communities it has not legislated about.
Related Nebraska HOA Topics
- Specialized registration information, Nebraska Real Estate Commission ↩
- Neb. Rev. Stat. § 81-885.01, Nebraska Real Estate License Act definitions ↩
- Neb. Rev. Stat. § 81-885.04, exemptions from the Real Estate License Act ↩
- CAI 2026 Nebraska End of Legislative Session Report, Community Associations Institute ↩
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