Where this lands on an association

Three situations put a North Dakota association on the landlord side of the line.

The association owns a unit. Most commonly after enforcing an assessment lien. If it is rented, the association is a landlord and chapter 47-16 governs the relationship.

A caretaker, manager or groundskeeper residence. Occupied under a lease or as part of employment, this is residential tenancy territory.

A clubhouse apartment or guest suite let for a term. Short stays are a different question; a term tenancy is not.

In all three the failed bills matter as much as the passed ones, because they tell you what the rules are not.

There is no statutory cap on late fees. SB 2236 would have set one and failed 7-39. Whatever the lease says governs. Note the contrast with manufactured-home communities, where SB 2385 did pass and now caps a monthly late fee at ten percent of monthly rent plus no more than five dollars a day.

There is no statutory payment-ordering rule. SB 2235 would have said whether a tenant's payment goes to rent, to fees, or to arrears first. It failed 6-40. An association applying payments to accrued late charges before current rent is doing what its lease permits, and nothing else constrains it. That is worth writing into the lease explicitly, because a dispute about it has no statutory answer.

The eviction notice has no prescribed content beyond the existing statute. SB 2366 failed 8-37. Again the contrast: § 47-10-28 now requires a mobile home park eviction notice to carry boldfaced language saying “You do not have to vacate immediately. You have the right to remain until a court issues an eviction order.” No equivalent applies to an ordinary residential tenancy.

Move-in and move-out inspections remain a matter of practice. HB 1272 would have made them statutory and failed 41-47. An association withholding a deposit for damage without a dated, photographed move-in condition report is relying on evidence it chose not to create.

What a board leasing a unit should put in place

Use a written lease with the gaps filled. Late fee amount and trigger, payment application order, inspection procedure, notice addresses. Every one of those is a term the legislature declined to supply.

Take no fee for a cheque or a money order. Section 47-16-20.1 is one of the two things that did change, and it applies to “any other payment required by the landlord under a lease.”

Document the unit's condition on the day the tenant takes possession. Photographs, dated, signed by both sides.

Keep the association's two roles apart. An association that is both the landlord of unit 12 and the enforcer of the covenants against unit 12 should decide, and minute, which hat it is wearing for each action. Our North Dakota fining authority page covers the covenant side.

Screen carefully and consistently. HB 1395 on criminal background checks failed 15-31, so North Dakota supplies no rule — and HUD withdrew its own criminal-records guidance in 2026 while leaving the Fair Housing Act and its two-year private right of action intact.

What to watch next

A cluster of bills defeated by margins like 6-40 and 7-39 does not usually return in the next session unchanged. The more likely route is that a provision that worked somewhere else gets lifted across — and the obvious donor is SB 2385, whose ten-percent late-fee cap, ninety-day rent-increase notice and prescribed eviction-notice language all passed comfortably for manufactured-home communities in the same session. Watch the prefiling window for the 70th Legislative Assembly, which closes December 18, 2026.