After a couple years of waning popularity, homeowners associations are on the rise for new single-family residences — even if they’re not a priority for prospective buyers.
In 2024, 65.7% of new single-family builds were in a community or homeowners association, according to Census Bureau data the National Association of Home Builders analyzed. That percentage equaled 677,000, according to the Census Bureau, which defines HOAs as “formal legal entities created to maintain common areas of a development and to enforce private deed restrictions; these organizations are usually created when the development is built, and membership is mandatory.”
Rooted in community covenants, the HOAs of today coalesced in the early 20th century. California’s 1916-era Los Feliz Improvement Association offers one example of an early HOA, according to Las Vegas-based Isaacson Law, setting specific rules for design standards and property maintenance. By the midcentury, a post-World War II development boom saw these organizations become commonplace as car-centric lifestyles prompted the rise of new master-planned neighborhoods.
“The continued growth in single-family homes within HOAs reflects the appeal of planned communities and the resilience of this housing model,” Jake Gold, executive director of the Foundation for Community Association Research in Falls Church, Virginia, said via email. “Community associations now house nearly 80 million Americans and represent one-third of the U.S. housing stock. Buyers are drawn to these communities for proximity to job centers, schools and transit, as well as for the predictable governance and shared amenities they provide. Planned communities also allow municipalities to manage costs for services such as trash collection, snow removal and road maintenance, supporting sustainable growth without additional taxpayer burden.”
To be sure, some homeowners view HOAs as formalized structures of community care that protect property values, but other buyers see their requirements as signals of needless restriction and rigid conformity. The often risk-averse governance structures can also act as a roadblock for sustainable residential development, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, found, often mandating that homes maintain a large square footage.
When NAHB asked prospective homebuyers about purchase priorities, only 39% indicated that buying into a community with an HOA was influential in their decision, far less than the respondents who cared about proximity to green spaces or retail. Still, HOAs have largely been on the rise since 2009, when 47.6% of new single-family homes were built in community associations. That percentage trended up — hitting a record of 67.1% in 2020 — until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, falling to 65.5% in 2021 and 62.6% in 2022.
The trend followed for new single-family home sales: After a 2019-2020 peak of 652,000 new single-family homes in HOAs selling, 558,000 were purchased from 2023-2024.
New single-family construction in HOAs isn’t distributed evenly across the country. Nearly 82% of new single-family homes built in Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico were in HOAs in 2024. The Southern states weren’t far behind, with many posting percentages in the low-70s.
New England has the smallest sliver — barely one-third (34.1%) of new single-family homes were built in HOAs.