How HOA Notes researches and verifies its guides

The HOA Notes Editorial Team is the research desk behind every state guide, topic comparison, and community review on this site. It is part of HOA Notes, operated by Aliso LLC. The job is narrow and specific: read the primary statute, confirm what it actually says, and write it in plain language a buyer can use. No page publishes until someone other than its writer has checked the citations against the source.

We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice. The guides describe what a state's statutes say and what to look for in a disclosure packet. For advice on a specific purchase, talk to a real estate attorney licensed in that state.

Each statutory claim is checked against the state's primary source - the official legislative text, such as California's leginfo, Florida's flsenate.gov, or the Texas statutes site - plus at least one independent corroborating source. The primary source stays the single source of truth, and we cite it on the page.

Every guide carries a visible Sources block listing the statute, the publisher, and the date we last checked it. If a claim cannot be confirmed against the primary text, it does not go on the page. A bill that has passed one chamber but is not yet law, for example, stays off the guide until it is enacted.

Statutes change between legislative sessions. We treat our own law database as a spine, not the last word, and confirm recent amendments against the legislature's current text rather than a cached copy.

Behind the guides is an audited law database for the ten states HOA Notes covers: California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Washington, and Illinois. Each state's entries were checked against that state's primary statutory source and a corroborating source, with a per-state set of regression checks so a wrong citation cannot quietly slip back in.

When the database changes, the affected pages are rebuilt from it. That keeps the statute shown on a guide and the statute in the database the same, instead of letting a page drift away from its source over time.

The same standard runs through the paid product. A brief reads your HOA disclosure documents together with the SPQ, TDS, and NHD, scores the risk, ranks every red flag it finds, and puts a page citation on each one so you can check it yourself. Where a community's own rules conflict with its state's statute, the brief flags it and names the statute. You can read a sample brief to see the format.

Each guide shows the date it was last reviewed. When a statute is amended, we update the database and rebuild the page from it. Every guide also has a quick feedback control at the bottom. If something looks wrong, use it or email us, and we will check it against the primary source and correct it.