What the rule actually restricts

It bars Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks from buying, or taking security interests in, mortgages on property encumbered by a private transfer fee covenant — unless the covenant is excepted.

The definitions are broad. A “private transfer fee” is “a transfer fee, including a charge or payment, imposed by a covenant, restriction, or other similar document and required to be paid in connection with or as a result of a transfer of title to real estate, and payable on a continuing basis each time a property is transferred… for a period of time or indefinitely.” A “private transfer fee covenant” is one that purports to run with the land and obligates a transferee or transferor to pay such a fee.

An association capital contribution, working-capital charge, initiation fee or reserve contribution collected at closing is a private transfer fee within that definition. Whether it is excepted turns on two questions.

The two ways an association breaks the exception

The money goes somewhere else. The fee runs to the developer, to the management company, or to a third-party fee-stream investor rather than to the association. This is the classic failure and it is usually a drafting decision made decades ago by a developer's lawyer.

The declaration is open-ended about what the money can be spent on. The exception requires the declaration to limit use “exclusively to purposes which provide a direct benefit to the real property encumbered.” A clause that says the fee goes to the association “for such purposes as the Board may determine” does not say that.

Note the direction of the requirement: it is about what the declaration provides, not about what the board actually does with the money. An association that spends every dollar on the common elements but whose declaration imposes no limit has an unexcepted covenant on the face of the instrument.

The Oklahoma hook, and why the retroactivity matters here

Oklahoma developers in the 2000s used developer-retained resale fees in some master-planned communities in the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metros. Those are exactly the covenants the restriction was written to reach.

The March 2026 amendment matters precisely at that point. It restored, retroactively to July 2012, the shelter for covenants created before February 8, 2011 — which is when most Oklahoma developer-fee covenants were written. Its absence from the rule between 2024 and 2026 was a drafting accident, but for two years the text of the regulation did not contain the protection those communities relied on.

What a board can do

Read the transfer-fee clause in your own declaration. Three questions: who is the fee payable to, when was the covenant created, and does the instrument limit how the money may be used?

If the fee runs to anyone other than the association, get advice now. That is a financeability problem for every unit, and it surfaces at a closing rather than in a letter.

If the fee runs to the association but the use language is open-ended, consider amending it. Adding a limitation to the encumbered property is a narrow amendment that brings the covenant inside the exception. In Oklahoma, amendment generally runs through the thresholds at 11 O.S. § 42-106.1 — 70% of owners after ten years, 60% after fifteen.

Do not create a new transfer fee without checking this rule first. A board that adopts a capital contribution at resale, payable to the association, with no stated use limitation, has just created an unexcepted covenant on units built after February 2011.

A note for buyers and sellers

Oklahoma has no statutory resale-certificate regime and no statutory cap on what an association may charge at closing. The state's Residential Property Condition Disclosure Statement effective January 1, 2026 asks whether there are unpaid dues or assessments and how much, and item 49 asks about “any other fees, leases, liens, dues or financed fixtures or improvements required on the property that you have not disclosed.” A transfer fee payable to a party other than the association belongs in that answer.

What to watch next

Nothing is pending at FHFA. The live risk in this area is not regulatory, it is documentary: most Oklahoma declarations containing transfer-fee clauses have never been read against 12 C.F.R. Part 1228 by anyone, and the problem announces itself when a sale fails.