A mislabelled lis pendens cost $265,000, at $5,000 a lot
A mislabelled lis pendens cost $265,000, at $5,000 a lot
2026-09-15 · Oregon · Courts
A declarant recorded notices of lis pendens against 53 lots in an Oregon planned community and described the object of the suit as enforcing a lien. The suit did not enforce a lien. The bill was $265,000. Calaveras II, LLC v. Eastside Bend, LLC, 350 Or App 259, was decided June 3, 2026 and is precedential.1
What went wrong
ORS 93.740 allows a notice of lis pendens to be recorded, and requires it to include the object of the suit. The notices here described that object as enforcement of a “CC&Rs lien.”
The trial court found the underlying action did not involve a lien of any kind, and on appeal that point was conceded.
The holding on validity
“When that object is described as the enforcement of a lien, when in fact the suit does not seek to enforce a lien, that is not a notice that includes the object of the lawsuit as required by ORS 93.740. Thus, when a recorder of a notice of lis pendens chooses to identify the 'theory' that the notice is based upon in including 'the object of the suit,' they must do so accurately.”
And: “Here, the Notices were invalid because they did not include the object of the suit, because, in fact, the underlying action did not involve the enforcement of a lien. … Therefore, the trial court correctly concluded that the Notices did not comply with their authorizing statute, ORS 93.740, and did not err in granting the petition and striking the Notices under ORS 205.460.”1
The holding on damages
This is the part with the number attached. ORS 205.470 provides minimum statutory damages of $5,000 to “the owner of the property bound by the claim of encumbrance.” The question was what “property” means.
“Bringing that all together, the 'owner of the property bound by the claim of encumbrance,' in ORS 205.470, refers to the owner of title to a specific piece of real property—that is, the 'property' is the individually titled piece of real property bound by the invalid encumbrance. As such, statutory damages are permitted for each property—each unit of land—that has an invalidly encumbered title.”
Not per filing. Not per claimant. Per lot.
Why owning many lots does not consolidate the damages
The obvious counterargument was that the petitioners owned the lots in blocks, so there were only a handful of owners. The court rejected it on purpose grounds:
“The fact that petitioners here each own multiple lots affected by respondents' invalid encumbrances does not affect how ORS 205.470 operates, because the purpose of the statute is to deter the clouding of individual title to real property with invalid encumbrances.”
“In sum, because the titles of 53 separate lots were invalidly encumbered by respondents' Notices, the trial court did not err in awarding $5,000 for each property bound by the Notices under ORS 205.470, for a total award of $265,000.”1
Plus attorney fees.
What it means for Oregon associations
Because recording instruments against members' titles is ordinary association business, and the multiplier in this case is the number of lots affected.
An association has genuine lien rights. ORS 94.709 for planned communities and ORS 100.450 for condominiums create assessment liens, and recording one is routine and lawful. A notice of lis pendens in litigation that actually concerns title is likewise lawful and appropriate.
What this case penalises is a mismatch between what the recorded document says the proceeding is about and what it is actually about. That is a drafting failure, not a strategic one, and it is the kind of failure that scales badly: a single template used across a whole community produces one error repeated 53 times, and ORS 205.470 counts each repetition.
Consider the exposure arithmetic in a community of ordinary size. A 76-lot planned community, encumbered across the board, is $380,000 at the statutory minimum before fees. In a 200-unit condominium it is a million dollars.
What a board can do before recording anything
Three checks.
Is there actually a lien? An assessment lien under ORS 94.709 or ORS 100.450 is one thing. A general covenant-enforcement claim, a governance dispute, a declaratory judgment action about who holds declarant rights — none of those is a lien enforcement, and describing them as one is what happened here.
Does the recorded description match the pleading? The safest practice is to describe the object of the suit in the words of the complaint's prayer for relief, rather than in a shorthand characterisation.
How many titles does this touch? If the answer is more than one, the potential downside has been multiplied, and the review before recording should be proportionate to that.
Our Oregon collections and liens page covers the lien rights an association genuinely has, and our Oregon foreclosure page covers what enforcing one involves.
The case it grew out of
This is the companion to Eastside Bend, LLC v. Calaveras II, LLC, 349 Or App 550, decided three weeks earlier, in which the Court of Appeals gave its first interpretations of several Planned Community Act provisions — holding that ORS 94.623 is the exclusive route for transferring special declarant rights, and that Oregon law recognises no “joint declarant.”
The two decisions together are a single cautionary sequence about a stalled Deschutes County subdivision: a declarant retaining 23 of 76 lots, exercising control over the whole community, suspending owners' voting rights without the notice and hearing the bylaws required, adopting a CC&R amendment on the resulting vote, and encumbering the other owners' titles. The declarant won on some legal questions and lost expensively on others.
What to watch next
Whether ORS 205.470's per-lot measure gets tested at scale. Nothing in the reasoning is limited to notices of lis pendens — the statute reaches an invalid “claim of encumbrance” generally, and the per-title rule would apply the same way to any instrument recorded across a community's titles.
As of the most recent published disposition list, no petition for review in docket A184616 has been allowed or denied.
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