The 50-State Managing-Agent Licensure Gap

The 50-State Managing-Agent Licensure Gap

Working paper — draft in progress. Version 0.2.

Note on scope (v0.2). This paper is the single canonical version of TASFGA’s multi-state comparison. It absorbs the six-state peer comparison and gap crosswalk previously maintained separately in Focus 1 field reporting. Where any other TASFGA or Focus 1 page states a multi-state count, it should cite this paper rather than restate the count independently.

Abstract

A barber in New York State must hold a licence. The firm managing a $200M residential building and a $15M annual budget does not. This paper surveys all 50 states and the District of Columbia to document the regulatory framework — or its absence — governing condominium and cooperative managing agents: the firms that exercise day-to-day financial and operational control over the buildings where, per the Foundation for Community Association Research, more than 75 million Americans live.

The finding the survey is organised around is not that New York regulates this sector badly. It is that New York, which licenses roughly 35 occupations through its Department of State and operates one of the most heavily regulated rental housing markets in the country, applies effectively no governance regulation at the point where residents own the building themselves.

Section 0 — What this paper is not about: the voluntary credential

The most common objection to the framing above is that community association managers are credentialed, and it is a fair objection to meet early rather than bury in a footnote. The Certified Manager of Community Associations (CMCA) is administered by the Community Association Managers International Certification Board, which describes itself as “the professional accreditation body for over 25,000 community association managers worldwide” and states that the CMCA programme “is accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) through March 2030,” has held ANSI National Accreditation Board accreditation under ISO/IEC 17024 since April 2021, and “remains the only accredited certification for community association management professionals worldwide” (CAMICB, About). Certification requires a prerequisite course or two years’ documented experience, a 120-question proctored examination, agreement to a standards-of-conduct code, and 16 hours of continuing education every two years (CAMICB, Get Certified).

That is a substantial credential, and nothing in this paper disputes it. The paper is about a different instrument. A voluntary certification and a state licence answer different questions:

	Voluntary certification	State licence
Condition of practice	No	Yes, where enacted
Reaches the manager who never sought it	No	Yes
Attaches to the firm holding the contract	No	In some states, yes
Consequence of withdrawal	Loss of a designation	Loss of the right to practise
Owner’s complaint channel	The certifying body, as to conduct	A state agency, with audit and enforcement power

The seven survey questions in Section 1 are therefore posed about licensure and public enforcement, not about the availability of a credential. Where a state is coded “No” on manager licensure, that coding does not assert that no manager in the state is certified. It asserts that certification is not a condition of holding the management contract, that an uncertified manager is not thereby practising unlawfully, and that an owner with a complaint has no state body to bring it to. New York is such a state: any New York manager may sit the CMCA examination, and the gap this paper documents is unaffected by how many do.

Section 1 — The survey rubric

Each state is surveyed against seven uniform questions:

1. Is a licence required to manage a community association?
2. What exam or education is prerequisite?
3. Is a bond or insurance mandate in place?
4. Is there a public complaint registry?
5. Is there a disciplinary body with enforcement power?
6. Are there continuing-education requirements?
7. What are the penalties for unlicensed practice?

A parallel set of five questions is applied at the association level rather than the manager level, because several states regulate the entity where they do not regulate the operator:

1. Must the association itself register with a state body?
2. Is there a reserve-funding floor, and can it be waived?
3. Is a reserve or structural-integrity study required, by whom, and on what cycle?
4. Is there a mandatory financial-disclosure regime to owners and to buyers?
5. Is there an administrative enforcement path short of civil litigation?

Sources are exclusively primary: state statutes, administrative codes, licensing-board publications, and records productions where necessary. Secondary sources are cited for context and never as the basis for a coded value.

Section 2 — Anchor findings

Verified against primary sources:

• Florida licenses community association managers (Fla. Stat. ch. 468, pt. VIII) — exam, continuing education, and a disciplinary arm within the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
• Nevada requires a community-manager certificate (NRS ch. 116A) with an enforcement commission that has revoked credentials.
• Virginia regulates management firms through its Common Interest Community Board, established 2008.
• California imposes a certification-and-disclosure regime on common-interest-development managers (Bus. & Prof. Code §§11500–11506).
• New York requires none of this. No licence, no exam, no bond, no continuing education, no disciplinary body, and no public complaint registry for residential managing agents.

Section 3 — Six-state peer comparison

The states below were selected as peers on two grounds: the four with active oversight regimes represent the range of models a legislature could adopt, and the two without represent the only states whose governance gaps approach New York’s.

Dimension	FL	NV	VA	CA	MA	NJ	NY
Manager licensure	Yes	Yes (certificate)	Yes (firm-level)	Certification regime	No	No	No
Public complaint registry	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial	No	No	No
Reserve funding floor	Yes	Yes	Partial	Disclosure-based	No	No	No
Mandatory disclosure regime	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited	Offering-stage	Offering-stage only
Administrative enforcement	DBPR	Ombudsman + Division	CICB	Limited	No	Limited	None

New York sits closer to Massachusetts than to any of the four states with active oversight. Even New Jersey, the nearer of the two gap states, maintains more active state involvement at the offering-plan stage than New York maintains after it.

The pattern that matters is in the last row. Four of these states created an administrative path — a body a resident can complain to, that can investigate, and that can impose a consequence. New York’s only route runs through trial-level civil litigation, which is measured in years and in tens of thousands of dollars, and is therefore unavailable to substantially all of the population it would serve. A right with no reachable remedy is a disclosure.

Section 4 — The trigger-event pattern

A finding that recurs across the states with active regimes, and one this paper treats as its central comparative claim: oversight regimes are not adopted in anticipation of failure. They are adopted after a failure large enough to be undeniable, and the reform is scoped to the failure that produced it.

This has two consequences for reform advocacy, and they cut against each other:

• Legislatures do act. The states above are proof that the political economy is not immovable.
• What they enact is shaped by the specific disaster that preceded it, which means a jurisdiction that has not yet had its disaster gets no regime, and a jurisdiction that has had one gets a regime narrowly fitted to that disaster rather than to the underlying governance gap.

The implication for a jurisdiction with no triggering event is that reform must be argued from accumulated documented failure rather than from a single catastrophe — which is an argument that requires a record, and is the reason Focus 1 maintains one.

Section 5 — The gap crosswalk

Each documented New York gap is mapped to a jurisdiction that has already closed it by statute, and to the New York bill, if any, that would close it here. This is the section most directly usable in legislative advocacy: it converts “New York should do something” into “New York should do the thing this named statute already does.”

The crosswalk covers, among others: manager licensure, public registry of managers and associations, reserve-funding floors, structural-integrity study requirements, competitive-bidding thresholds, independent-audit requirements, financial disclosure to purchasers, and an administrative complaint path.

The New York column is largely empty, and the reason is documented separately: most of the corresponding bills were introduced and did not advance out of committee. That legislative history is tracked in Focus 1 field reporting and is the working evidence base for TASFGA’s Legislative Bodies area of focus.

Section 6 — Florida HB 913 as the reference statute

Florida House Bill 913, signed July 2025, is the most ambitious condominium-governance reform enacted in the United States to date and is the closest available model for a comprehensive New York statute. Its three operative mechanisms:

1. State registration of associations. Every condominium association must register with DBPR, reporting contact information, unit count, building age, and assessments. Note the design choice: Florida required the buildings to register, not merely the managers. Board minutes are posted on each association’s own website rather than to a central public database — a limitation worth recording, because it means the registry answers who exists but not what they decided.
2. Structural Integrity Reserve Study. Required for buildings of three storeys or more, and not waivable for major structural components. Associations confirm completion through DBPR. The non-waivability is the load-bearing element: reserve requirements that permit a member vote to waive them are waived.
3. Penalties for non-filing, enforced administratively by DBPR rather than through civil litigation.

New York’s registry gap is precisely what HB 913 closed. A New York adaptation would need to go further in one respect — publishing decisions, not merely existence — and could go less far in another, since New York’s building stock and storey thresholds differ materially from Florida’s.

Section 7 — What this paper does not claim

• It does not claim that licensure prevents misconduct. It claims that licensure creates a record of misconduct, and that the absence of a record is what makes the sector unmeasurable.
• It does not claim New York is the worst jurisdiction. On these dimensions it is closest to Massachusetts, and this paper does not rank beyond the seven jurisdictions coded above.
• It does not treat any state’s regime as adequate. Florida’s is the most comprehensive surveyed; it is also recent, incompletely implemented, and untested.
• Preliminary counts are not published. The full state-by-state grid is in progress, and no aggregate count of states in any category appears in this paper until every state is coded. Partial surveys are not sound bases for national claims, and a count published early is a count that gets cited after it is superseded.

Status

Research in progress. Publication target: Q3 2026. Partial state surveys will be released in the research library as they are completed, once membership opens. The six-state peer comparison in §3 is stable and may be cited now; §5’s crosswalk expands as states are coded.

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Working paper. Findings are preliminary and subject to revision through peer review. Field reporting supporting the New York column is published at condoscoopsnyc.org.