What else is carved out

The new section § 61-2f-202.5 adds two more exemptions that reach association work in practice. No licence is required for “an unlicensed or remote assistant of a property manager,” nor for “an individual who exclusively performs the following tasks: (a) maintenance and repairs on real property; or (b) bookkeeping and accounting.”

“Exclusively” is the operative word in the second. A bookkeeper who also negotiates a lease or shows a unit has stepped outside it.

The definition the exemption hangs on is borrowed: § 61-2f-102(7) provides that “‘Common interest association’ means the same as that term is defined in Section 57-1-46” — the same fee statute that defines the administrative setup fee and the reinvestment fee.

Why this is the live question in Utah right now

Utah's own regulators have flagged community-association managers as the gap in their oversight. In a report to the Business and Labor Interim Committee on August 19, 2026, the Department of Commerce set out five statutory options for resolving how the Division of Consumer Protection and the Division of Real Estate share property-management oversight — and explicitly excluded “Homeowners' Association property managers” from the report's scope, while listing them under the division gaps it had identified: “Some related issues were flagged, such as HOA property managers, the legal process for tenant eviction, and debt collection tactics.”²

That is a regulator saying, in its own words, that the category is unaddressed and known to be unaddressed.

The case sitting behind the question

The practical stakes were on the federal docket in December 2025, when a Cedar City property manager was sentenced to 25 months in prison and ordered to pay $2,168,640 in restitution after embezzling from HOAs, owners and tenants between 2020 and 2025.³ Utah's statutory response to manager handling of association money so far runs through the fee rules rather than through licensure: § 57-1-46(9)(b) requires that “No later than December 31 each year, if a manager collects an administrative setup fee, the manager shall provide to the association an annual accounting of each administrative setup fee the manager collects in a calendar year.”

An annual accounting of one fee category is a narrow instrument against the problem it is pointed at.

What an association's own documents still control

Nothing in the licensing act changes an association's contracting duties. Section 57-8a-217 governs how a board adopts rules; the Revised Nonprofit Corporation Act supplies the conflict-of-interest machinery at §§ 16-6a-822 and 16-6a-825, which the state's ombudsman has applied to association contracting. In Advisory Opinion 2026-03 (Wilson v. Scenic Mountain Homeowners Association, February 4, 2026), the office concluded that a board “did not violate the statutory requirements related to conflicts of interest by awarding a landscaping contract to a homeowner's business because the homeowner was not a board member and was not related to a board member.”⁴

Our Utah director qualifications page covers who may serve on a Utah board and the disqualifications that attach.

What to watch next

A standalone sole-property-manager licence takes effect January 1, 2027 under § 61-2f-102, and the interim committee's property-management oversight work is explicitly aimed at the 2027 General Session. Whether community-association managers are brought inside a licensing regime is the open item — the department has named it, and has not yet proposed a rule for it.