The Attorney General registers only half of you
The Attorney General registers only half of you
2026-09-15 · Pennsylvania · Regulation
What is the case. Pennsylvania has exactly one registration requirement for common-interest communities, it lives with the Attorney General, and it applies to planned communities only. Condominiums have no equivalent.1
What the Attorney General requires
The Office's own resource page on the Uniform Planned Community Act states, verbatim: "All planned communities which do not utilize the escrowing of deposits within this Commonwealth must register with the Office of Attorney General", and that "the bond or letter of credit must be deposited with the Office of Attorney General where it is held to ensure UPCA compliance."1
The named filings are a Registration Application and a Certification of Compliance with Financial Security. The page records that the UPCA "went into effect on February 2, 1997."
What it is actually for
Consumer protection at the point of sale by a declarant, not oversight of an association. The financial security exists so that a buyer's deposit is protected if the developer fails — either the deposits are escrowed in Pennsylvania, or the developer posts a bond or letter of credit with the Attorney General instead.
It is therefore declarant-side and pre-sale. It attaches when a community is being created and sold, and it says nothing about how the association is run afterwards.
The asymmetry
There is no parallel Attorney General registration for condominiums under the Uniform Condominium Act. Two Pennsylvania communities that look identical, were built by the same developer in the same year, and operate the same way, will have different registration histories depending on which chapter of Title 68 the declaration was filed under.
The consequence: nobody counts Pennsylvania's associations
Because registration is chapter-specific, declarant-side and pre-sale, no Pennsylvania agency holds a current list of the Commonwealth's community associations. Not the Attorney General, not the Department of State, not the Department of Community and Economic Development.
The Department of State knows which nonprofit corporations exist, but its records do not distinguish a homeowners association from a choral society — and the annual report it now requires does not ask. The Attorney General holds declarant registrations from planned communities going back to 1997, which is a record of creation rather than a register of what exists now.
That absence is not a curiosity. It is why nobody can say with confidence how many Pennsylvanians live in community associations, which in turn is why the Commonwealth has no basis on which to assess whether any of the regulatory gaps around them matter.
The bills that would fix the counting problem
Two companions would require counties to inventory common-interest communities. HB 1377, sponsored by Rep. Tim Brennan and referred to the House Housing and Community Development Committee on 2 May 2025, and SB 920, sponsored by Sen. David Argall and referred to the Senate Local Government Committee on 15 July 2025. Neither has moved.2
The mechanism from HB 1377, verbatim: "(a.1) Annual report.--Consistent with the requirements under section 207(a) of the … Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code, a planning agency of the county in which any portion of a condominium is located shall prepare annually and maintain a report identifying each condominium created and located within the municipality by the condominium's name and physical location and shall include: (1) the total land area and number of units of the condominium; and (2) to the extent reasonably available within the county government, the infrastructure of each condominium, including information concerning the presence of sanitary sewer, water and storm water systems, recreation facilities and roadways."2
Declarants would file a matching statement with the county planning agency when recording a declaration.
Note what these bills would collect: not just names and unit counts but infrastructure — sewer, water, stormwater, recreation facilities and roadways. That is the same information a separate pending bill, HB 2746, would require to be disclosed at every resale. Two different bills, from different sponsors in different chambers, have independently identified association infrastructure ownership as the thing Pennsylvania does not know and should.
That these are bipartisan companions — a House Democrat and a Senate Republican — and that neither has had a committee vote in over a year, is a reasonable summary of the Commonwealth's appetite for the subject.
What any of this means for an association
One concrete thing, for planned communities of a certain age. If your community was created after February 1997 under the UPCA and the developer posted a bond or letter of credit with the Attorney General rather than escrowing deposits, that security was posted to ensure UPCA compliance. Boards at communities where the declarant's obligations were never cleanly completed — unfinished common facilities, undelivered infrastructure, incomplete conveyances at turnover — rarely think to ask what became of it. It is a question the Office of Attorney General can answer.
More generally, the practical reading of Pennsylvania's registration landscape is that no state body holds records about a board's community. The association's own records are the only records. That makes the corporate filings, the recorded declaration and plat, the turnover documents and the deed history the association's institutional memory, and there is no state backup copy.
What to watch next
The session ends 30 November 2026 with no carryover, so HB 1377 and SB 920 die then on the current record. The Attorney General's registration function is unaffected by anything pending — it operates under a statute that was not amended in this session, like the rest of Title 68.
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