Why this reaches associations specifically

Because House Bill 3746 also wrote an association-only version of the right-to-repair process. Section 12 of the Act, added to ORS 701.560 to 701.595, applies where the sender of the notice of defect is a homeowners association or an association of unit owners, and it rewrites the timetable:

“(1) The periods during which a contractor, subcontractor or supplier may send a written request to conduct a visual examination or request to inspect the residence under ORS 701.570 (2) or (3) are each extended from 14 days to 30 days. (2) The contractor, subcontractor or supplier may have a technical or construction expert attend an inspection requested under ORS 701.570 (3). (3) The contractor, subcontractor or supplier shall send the owner a written response, as required under ORS 701.570 (5), no later than: (a) Fourteen days after conducting an inspection of the residence under ORS 701.575 (3); or (b) If no inspection is conducted, 90 days after receiving a notice of defect or secondary notice.”²

It then constrains what an offer may look like:

“(4) An offer to pay an amount under ORS 701.570 (5)(c)(B): (a) Must be based on the amount equal to the cost of remediation. (b) May allow the owner a choice between accepting the payment or allowing the contractor, subcontractor or supplier to perform remediation. (5) And if the contractor, subcontractor or supplier does not send a response that is timely under subsection (3) of this section or that conforms to the requirements in subsection (4) of this section, the owner is excused from further compliance with this section.”

And it builds in a mediation path:

“(6) And if an offer is made under subsection (4)(a) of this section to pay an amount equal to the cost of remediation, the contractor, subcontractor or supplier has 30 days after sending the response to offer a firm payment amount. If the owner wishes to accept an offer of payment, but disputes the amount, the parties may select a mediator to attempt resolution. If the parties cannot agree on a mediator after 45 days, the parties may request that the administrator of the Construction Contractors Board inform a professional mediation association or service that the parties wish to have a mediator selected by the association or service.”

Subsection (7) requires an owner who accepts a cost-of-remediation payment to “make a good faith effort to have a construction contractor complete remediation.”

The combination is the story

An association-initiated defect process in Oregon now runs on a longer, more structured timetable than a homeowner's — 30 days for inspection requests instead of 14, a 90-day outer limit for a response where no inspection happens, a compelled 30-day firm-amount offer, and a 45-day mediator-selection fallback. All of that generates a documented paper trail of positions and numbers.

And none of it is protected any more. With ORS 701.580(6) gone, the offers, counteroffers and stated remediation costs produced by that process are not categorically inadmissible in the litigation that follows. Ordinary evidence rules on compromise offers still apply and will do substantial work, but the flat statutory bar that practitioners relied on is not there to be cited.

The tolling protection that came with it

One provision moved in the other direction. New ORS 701.585(3) protects a party who sends a secondary notice down the chain:

“However, the right of the sender of the secondary notice to commence a court action against the recipient of the secondary notice shall be extended, notwithstanding any statute of limitation or statute of ultimate repose, until the date that the right of the owner to commence a court action against the sender of the secondary notice expires.”

A general contractor facing an association claim in year six of a seven-year repose keeps its own claim alive against the subcontractor for as long as the association's claim against it survives.

What to watch next

Section 17 of the Act limits all of this to “notices of construction defect that are delivered by an owner on or after the effective date of this 2025 Act and to any resulting secondary notices” — so unlike the repose change, these provisions are keyed to the notice date, not the declaration recording date. Every Oregon association sending a notice of defect today is inside the new regime regardless of when its declaration was recorded. Our Oregon dispute resolution page covers the wider set of pre-litigation obligations an Oregon association carries.