Renting Your Unit

Why leasing rules matter here

Owner-landlords are a large share of this community and often the least engaged in its governance. Leasing restrictions are a recurring source of friction with boards, and absentee owners rarely hear anything except billing notices.

How many units are rented here

As of September 29, 2026, 107 of the 192 units at Jamacha Greens carried a tenant on the Association’s resident directory — about 56%. Owner-occupied units are the minority here, and have been for some time.

The directory is the managing agent’s own list of who is at each unit, kept for the Association and served to every owner with a portal login. Each unit has an owner record, and a unit that is rented out carries a tenant record beside it — only 20 of the 107 name the tenant; the other 87 carry a placeholder name rather than the tenant’s own, which is the manager recording that a unit is rented rather than who rents it. So the figure is the Association’s knowledge of its own tenancies, not a census, and it moves as the directory is updated.

Who the landlords are is on the same list. 138 of the 192 units belong to an owner of record who owns exactly one unit here — about 72% — and only 6 of the 192 units are held in the name of an LLC, a trust or a corporation. The rented units are mostly single units rented out by their owners, not a portfolio.

Source: Jamacha Greens Resident Directory, provided by Pernicano Realty & Management on its owner portal, read September 17, 2026. The directory carries no date of its own, so the date is the day it was read. It replaces a figure of 117 given by the management company by telephone on March 31, 2026.

That number matters for the section below. A rental cap cannot be set below 25% of the units, so any cap the Association could lawfully adopt would sit far under the share already rented. Civil Code § 4740 would also exempt owners who bought before it was adopted.

What the rental share does to financing here

The same figure read the other way is the one a lender cares about, with a caveat the directory imposes on itself. 192 units less the 107 carrying a tenant leaves 85, and 85 of 192 is 44.27% — but that is a ceiling on the owner-occupied count, not the count. A unit with no tenant record is one the managing agent does not record as rented, which is not the same as one the owner lives in: a vacant unit, a second home and a tenancy nobody told the office about all sit on the same side of that subtraction.

The Association tells every owner this once a year. Civil Code § 5300(b)(10) makes an association state in its annual budget report whether it is certified by the Federal Housing Administration, and makes it spell out what certification is worth first:

“Certification by the Federal Housing Administration may provide benefits to members of an association, including an improvement in an owner’s ability to refinance a mortgage or obtain secondary financing and an increase in the pool of potential buyers of the separate interest.”

The statement issued to members on November 1, 2025 fills in the blank this way:

“This common interest development is a condominium project. The association of this common interest development is not certified by the Federal Housing Administration.”

The § 5300(b)(11) statement on the next line says the same about the Department of Veterans Affairs. Both are in section F and section G of the Annual Policy Statement, the one that arrives with the budget every fall.

HUD’s record supplies the date the Association’s does not. Its list of FHA-approved condominium projects carries Jamacha Greens as Condo ID S003394, covering all 192 units, with a status date of December 9, 1999, an expiration date of August 31, 2011, and a status of Expired. The same row puts FHA concentration here at 0.52% — the share of units carrying an active FHA-insured mortgage or an assigned case number — and 1 of 192 is 0.5208%, so that is one unit in the whole place.

HUD’s own field descriptions say an expiration date is set “based on the Approval Date of the first submission”, which means approval runs out on a clock unless somebody applies to renew it. So the record shows that nobody recertified. It does not show that the project was turned down, and no document we hold says why.

Owner-occupancy is one of the things a recertification has to clear, and the bar moved:

• The guide in force when ours expired required, for an existing project, that “[a]t least 50 percent of the units of a project must be owner-occupied”. Half of 192 is 96 units.
• The handbook in force today requires an owner-occupancy percentage of at least 35 percent. 35% of 192 is 67.2, so it takes 68 units.

At no more than 85 owner-occupied we are above today’s bar by at most seventeen units and below the old one by at least eleven. The ceiling cuts one way only — it cannot make either margin larger than that. And what we cannot tell you is where the ratio stood in 2011: the 107 is a figure from September 2026, and nothing we hold records the split fifteen years ago.

The other bar, and this one the directory answers

Owner-occupancy is not the only thing a recertification has to clear. FHA also caps what any one owner may hold, and on that the Association’s own directory gives a plain answer.

The handbook in force today requires, for a project of twenty or more units, that “the Individual Owner Concentration is 10 percent or less”. The guide in force when ours expired said the same thing in different words: “no single investor / entity may own more than 10 percent of the total number of units.” 10% of 192 is 19.2, so nineteen units is the most one owner may hold here and twenty would be over.

The largest holding on the directory is 18 of 192, which is 9.375% — inside the cap, with one unit to spare. So concentration is not what stands between this project and a recertification.

What did change is the half a reader would not guess. Since October 15, 2019 the handbook counts a “Related Party” against that same cap — “an individual related to the Unit owner by blood, marriage or operation of law” — where the 2011 guide had no related-party concept at all. Units moved into an owner’s children’s names were somebody else’s units in 2011. They are not now.

What has changed in the owner’s favor

The same 2019 rule that tightened the cap opened a door beside it. FHA now runs a Single-Unit Approval process for individual units in projects whose status is Expired, so an expired project is no longer the flat bar to an FHA buyer that it was in 2012.

Sources: Annual Budget Report and Policy Statement, November 1, 2025, sections F and G; Civil Code § 5300(b)(10) and (b)(11); HUD list of FHA-approved condominium projects, Condo ID S003394, queried September 14, 2026, and HUD's published field descriptions for that list; FHA Condominium Project Approval and Processing Guide (Mortgagee Letter 2011-22) §§ 2.1.4 and 3.5; FHA Single Family Housing Policy Handbook 4000.1 § II.A.8, effective October 15, 2019. The 107 and the 18 are the directory figures sourced above, and every count here is derived from them.

The 25% floor

Civil Code § 4741, added by AB 3182 and effective January 1, 2021, bars an association from adopting or enforcing any provision that prohibits or unreasonably restricts the rental or leasing of separate interests.

Concretely:

• An association may cap rentals, but not below 25% of the separate interests in the development.
• An accessory dwelling unit or junior ADU rented by an owner who occupies the residence does not count toward that cap.
• An association may require a minimum lease term, but not longer than 30 days — which permits a ban on short-term and transient rentals.
• An association may not require prior approval of a prospective tenant, or impose tenant-screening or waiting-period requirements that operate as a restriction on leasing.

Section 4741(f) required every association to amend its governing documents to conform by December 31, 2021. Section 4741(g) provides that an association that willfully violates these limits is liable to the applicant or member for actual damages and a civil penalty of up to $1,000.

Civil Code § 4740 separately protects owners who acquired their unit before a rental prohibition was adopted — such a prohibition generally does not apply to them.

What our documents say

Declaration L of the Restated CC&Rs prohibits transient or hotel-type rentals of less than thirty days, but otherwise grants owners the right to lease their units. That 30-day floor remains enforceable under § 4741(c).

What matters is anything beyond that. Leasing restrictions, waiting periods or tenant-approval requirements introduced through operating rules rather than a recorded amendment sit on weak ground twice over. Civil Code § 4741 caps what any association may impose, and Civil Code § 4205 puts operating rules at the bottom of the order of authority.

Our Rules and Regulations were last revised in January 2011, a decade before AB 3182. Where they conflict with § 4741, the statute controls.

There is no separate rental-restriction document

Civil Code § 4525 requires the association to hand a prospective buyer a specific list of documents, and a statement of rental restrictions is on it. What Jamacha Greens supplies under that heading is a single line:

“For rental restriction information please reference the Rules and Regulations or CC&Rs”

That is not an evasion, and it may well be the honest answer: there is no separate rental policy, so there is nothing else to hand over. But it sends a buyer, or an owner deciding whether they may lease, into sixty-odd pages of 1972 typescript with no pointer to the provision that governs.

That provision is Declaration L of the CC&Rs, and this page is the pointer. If anyone tells you a rental restriction applies that you cannot find there or in the Rules, ask which recorded provision it comes from.

Why this matters to the Coalition

Under our governing documents the vote belongs to the owner, not the resident. Bylaws Article II, Section 1 gives each owner of a condominium unit one vote per unit owned. An owner who lives in Arizona and has not attended a meeting in a decade holds exactly the same voting power as an owner-occupant who attends every month.

So a majority of the votes in this association are held by people who do not live in the unit they vote for — and in a community where the last election was cancelled for lack of candidates, most of them are not being asked for anything. Absentee owners are not the obstacle to reform. They are the largest untapped constituency in it.

Renters cannot vote in association elections, but they live with the outcomes, and § 4515 protects their right to participate in organizing alongside owners.