A contractor served the condominium regime but not the unit owners. Its lien dissolved
A contractor served the condominium regime but not the unit owners. Its lien dissolved
2026-09-19 · South Carolina · Courts
A Charleston contractor did exterior repairs for a horizontal property regime, filed a mechanic's lien, and served the regime within the statutory 90 days. It did not serve the individual unit owners. The lien dissolved.
The Court of Appeals decided Opinion No. 6106 on March 19, 2025; after a rehearing petition it was withdrawn, substituted and refiled on July 30, 2025, which is the operative version. It affirmed in part, reversed in part and remanded.1
The statutory rule
Section 27-31-230(a) of the Horizontal Property Act provides that no lien arising after recording of the master deed shall be effective against the property, and that during such period "liens or encumbrances shall arise or be created only against each apartment and the percentage of undivided interest in the common elements appurtenant to such apartment."
Reading that alongside the mechanic's lien statute at Section 29-5-90, the court held that service on the regime is not service on the unit owners. Each unit owner must be timely served, even where the regime itself was.
Actual knowledge did not save it
The contractor sought further discovery into whether owners had learned of the lien by some other route. The court held that irrelevant: Section 27-31-230(a) required service on them, so knowledge acquired elsewhere cannot perfect a lien. Mechanic's liens are purely statutory and exist only as the statutes allow.
What the court did with the costs
Summary judgment and dismissal for the regime and for an individual unit owner were affirmed. The attorney's fee awards to the regime and to that owner were reversed and remanded: once the lien dissolved, there was no statutory basis for the fees. An arbitration award confirmation was affirmed.
That combination is worth noting on its own. Defeating a lien on the service point does not automatically carry an entitlement to fees, because the fee provision travels with the lien statute that has just been held inapplicable.
Why this is a structural rule and not a technicality
A condominium regime is not a landowner in the ordinary sense. Once the master deed is recorded, the real property is the units plus each unit's undivided percentage interest in the common elements. There is no separate parcel belonging to the regime for a later lien to attach to.
So the service requirement follows from the ownership structure. A contractor repairing common elements is, in statutory terms, improving property owned in fractions by every owner in the building, and the lien attaches in those same fractions.
Three consequences follow at category level:
- For an association facing a contractor's lien: the first question is whether every unit owner was served within the statutory period, before any question about the quality or value of the work.
- For an association engaging a contractor: the regime cannot absorb a lien on the owners' behalf. A board that signs a repair contract is not insulating owners from lien exposure by contracting in the regime's name.
- For a contractor: the size of the service task scales with the building. A 200-unit regime means 200 owners to identify and serve inside 90 days.
The lien direction that runs the other way
This decision concerns liens against the association's property. An association's own assessment lien is a different instrument with a different source — it comes from the recorded declaration rather than from a lien statute, and an action to foreclose it is an action in equity, as the Court of Appeals confirmed in a footnote in Oak Forest Homeowners Association v. Dennison, 2025-UP-443, citing Wachesaw Plantation East Community Services Association v. Alexander.2
That distinction matters because the two are frequently conflated. Nothing in TCC of Charleston affects how a South Carolina association perfects and enforces an assessment lien.
A related change in the same window
In Horry and Georgetown Counties, a Fifteenth Circuit local rule approved by the Supreme Court on March 26, 2026 now automatically refers association-lien and mortgage foreclosures pending six months to the Master in Equity — and expressly exempts mechanics' lien actions from that automatic reference.
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