Why this reaches community associations

Association common area is frequently assessed at very little, because it has no market. A detention basin, a landscaped buffer strip, an entrance sign parcel, a pocket park, a private alley — each may be its own tax parcel, each may be assessed in the hundreds or low thousands, and each is within subsection A's ceiling by a wide margin.

Such parcels are also unimproved and often unencumbered, which is what subsection B's additional conditions ask about.

The risk is not that an association refuses to pay. It is that nobody notices the bill. Virginia's common area parcels are conveyed to associations at developer turnover, sometimes years after the homes were sold, and a parcel whose tax notice goes to a long-departed developer or a former management company can run three years delinquent without any current director knowing it exists.

What losing one actually costs

Considerably more than the taxes. A stormwater basin sold at auction does not take the association's stormwater obligation with it — that obligation typically runs from the recorded plat, the local maintenance agreement and the state permit, and it stays with the association whether or not the association still owns the land.

A private road parcel sold at auction is worse, because the association still has to provide access to every lot the road serves.

Recovering such a parcel afterwards means negotiating with whoever bought it, on their terms.

The practical check

The exposure is narrow and checkable. It turns on three facts: which tax parcels are titled to the association in the local assessment records, whether the mailing address on each is the association's current one, and whether each is current on tax. Communities that transitioned from declarant control in the last decade, and communities that changed management companies, are where the gaps tend to be.

This also intersects with a carried-over bill. HB 621 would require a declarant retaining unexpired control rights to disclose them — and incomplete turnover is precisely how a common-area parcel ends up with nobody watching its tax bill.

Where the association's own lien sits

Running the other way, an association holding an assessment lien against an owner's delinquent lot has its own interest in a tax sale of that lot. Section 55.1-1833 of the Property Owners' Association Act governs the association's lien; it was last amended in 2024 and was not touched in 2026.

Practitioner commentary on the 2025 session describes related changes to Virginia's tax-sale procedures concerning the naming of lien-holding parties as defendants. The specific enacting bill for that could not be identified from an original source for this piece, and it is not stated here as law.

The conditions that change the answer

Three years of delinquency is required — taxes delinquent on December 31 following the third anniversary of the due date.

Subsection B's extra conditions are cumulative. Assessment band, no recorded mortgage or deed of trust lien, and the parcel characteristics listed.

Assessed value, not market value, sets the band.

These are ceilings, not floors. Raising them widens the category of parcels exposed to the nonjudicial route.

What to watch next

Section 58.1-3975 has been amended in 2023, 2024 and 2025 in succession. It was not amended in 2026, but the direction of travel is consistent and the thresholds have moved repeatedly.