New Mexico licenses barbers and home inspectors. Not the person holding your HOA's reserves.
New Mexico licenses barbers and home inspectors. Not the person holding your HOA's reserves.
2026-09-15 · New Mexico · Regulation
There is no New Mexico licence for the person who manages a homeowner association and controls its bank accounts. No bond requirement, no continuing education, no complaint forum and no disciplinary authority.1
What the rulebook actually says
The Real Estate Commission's rules are at Title 16, Chapter 61 NMAC. A full-text search of the integrated rulebook for “community association,” “homeowners association,” “association manager” and “unit owner” returns no occurrences of any of them. The word “association” appears six times in the whole chapter, and every occurrence is incidental: “professional associations” as a category of interested reader, “association” as a business form inside the definitions of brokerage, person and qualifying broker, and two references to the real estate educators association in the course-content rules.
The chapter does have a property-management part. 16.61.24 NMAC, effective January 1, 2012 and amended three times since, applies to “all licensed New Mexico associate brokers and qualifying brokers engaged in property management,” and exists to “establish the requirements, policies and procedures that must be met by a New Mexico real estate associate broker or qualifying broker engaged in property management for others.” It addresses residential property management, vacation rentals and tenant agreements. It does not mention associations.
And none of the 28 boards covers it
The Regulation and Licensing Department licenses through 28 boards and commissions: accountancy, acupuncture, athletic training, barbers and cosmetologists, body art, chiropractic, counselling, dental health, funeral services, home inspectors, interior design, landscape architects, massage therapy, nursing home administrators, nutrition, occupational therapy, optometry, pharmacy, physical therapy, private investigations, psychology, real estate appraisers, the Real Estate Commission, respiratory care, signed language interpreting, social work, and speech-language pathology, among others.
None of them licenses a community association manager, an HOA manager, or a property manager as such.
What that means when something goes wrong
If a New Mexico management company misapplies an association's reserves, there is no Real Estate Commission complaint to file, because there is no licence to put at risk. The remedies are contractual and judicial — the management agreement, a suit, and the Attorney General's general Unfair Practices Act authority, which is aimed at deceptive business practices generally rather than at association management specifically.
That is a materially different position from the one owners in Florida, Nevada, Virginia or Colorado are in, and it is the single fact about New Mexico association management that most surprises people who move here.
What a board has to do instead of relying on a regulator
All of the protection an association gets is protection it writes for itself, in the management agreement and in its own controls. The questions that matter are unglamorous and entirely within a board's power:
Who holds the money, and in whose name. Are association funds in accounts titled to the association, at a bank the board selected, with the board as signatory — or in accounts controlled by the manager? Pooled or commingled arrangements are the ones that produce losses.
Who reconciles, and who sees the reconciliation. Monthly bank statements delivered to a board member directly by the bank, rather than through the manager, is the cheapest control available and the one most often missing.
What insurance stands behind the manager. A fidelity or crime policy covering the manager's handling of association funds, with the association as a named insured or loss payee, in an amount that reflects the reserve balance. This is a contract term a board must negotiate, because no statute supplies it.
What happens on termination. Which records, in what format, within how many days — written into the agreement, because there is no statutory records-turnover duty for a New Mexico manager.
One live question worth watching
The definition of “property management” at 16.61.1.7(PP) NMAC was amended on February 25, 2022 to describe property management as including the preparation of “leases or rental agreements, financial reports, disclosure certificates, resale certificates, and other documents.” That language does not appear in the 2021 edition of the rulebook.
Disclosure certificates and resale certificates are, in practice, association documents. Whether preparing an association resale certificate for compensation is therefore licensed activity in New Mexico is an open question — this is a reasoned inference from a definitional amendment, not a rule anyone has stated, and the Real Estate Commission has not addressed it. It is the closest the Commission's rules have come to touching association work, and a manager preparing resale packages for a fee may want a clearer answer than the rulebook currently gives.
What has not changed
Nothing, in either of the last two years. The Real Estate Commission adopted no rule amendments in 2025 or 2026, and its own page offers “Links to Real Estate Commission Rules as of March 2025.” The absence of licensing in New Mexico is not a gap that is being closed; it is the settled position.
Related New Mexico HOA Topics
Stay on top of New Mexico HOA law
Every week: new New Mexico legislation, court rulings, and regulatory developments affecting condos, planned communities, and property managers. Free.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.