Why a null finding is worth publishing

Because the alternative is a board or an owner assuming that something has changed. Covenant law is the kind of subject where people expect movement — there is always a case in some state making news — and the assumption that New Mexico has kept pace is wrong.

Concretely: there is no new New Mexico Supreme Court statement in this period on covenant interpretation, selective enforcement or waiver, assessment liens, board fiduciary duty, architectural control or declarant control. The authorities that governed those questions in 2024 govern them now.

What that means when you are arguing one

The body of authority a New Mexico district judge will actually apply is the older one — the published Supreme Court and Court of Appeals decisions that predate this window. A board told by a manager or a vendor that “New Mexico courts have recently held” something about covenants should ask for the citation, because in this period there is very little that could be meant.

The Court of Appeals did decide several association-adjacent matters in 2025 and 2026. Every one of them came in a memorandum opinion or a non-precedential decision, and in New Mexico those are not binding authority. That is a separate and equally important point, and it means the persuasive value of anything decided in this window is limited by design.

The one genuinely new binding rule

It is federal, and it is about collections. In New Hampshire Insurance Co. v. TSG Ski & Golf, LLC, decided February 24, 2025, the Tenth Circuit — whose published decisions bind the District of New Mexico — held that knowledge-of-falsity exclusions defeated both defence and indemnity coverage for an owners association whose board circulated a collection letter its members knew overstated what an owner owed, to an audience far beyond the owner.

That is the one new appellate rule in the period that reaches New Mexico boards, and it arrived from Colorado through a federal court rather than from Santa Fe.

What would change this

Two things, and a board watching for movement should watch for exactly these. The Supreme Court granting certiorari in a covenant case — nothing of the sort is currently pending. Or the Court of Appeals electing to publish one of its association decisions as a formal opinion rather than issuing it as a memorandum.

There is one honest limit on any statement of this kind. New Mexico's state district courts do not publish their decisions, and that is where most association disputes in the state are actually resolved. A null finding at the appellate level says nothing about what district judges are doing, and it does not mean associations are not being sued. They are; the results are simply not public.

The wider pattern

The silence in the courts matches the silence everywhere else. Every bill filed as an HOA bill in the 2025 and 2026 legislative sessions died. No state agency has subject-matter authority over associations, and no administrative rule adopted in either year anywhere in New Mexico state government uses the words “homeowner,” “condominium” or “community association.” The Attorney General has one standing opinion touching associations, issued in 2011, about solar panels.

The one change to the Homeowner Association Act in two years arrived as Section 4 of a child care zoning bill.