HOA compliance rating system coming to California home sales

Local real estate agents will begin offering prospective buyers a new way to review HOAs upon purchase at a time of low sales and tight lending scrutiny.

For $150, a homebuyer in escrow can buy a report from the artificial-intelligence fueled HOASnapshot.

Set to land May 1, the reader analyzes hundreds of digital HOA forms submitted by real estate agents to the program, which uses AI to review those pages and render a four-page evaluation.

The program’s debut comes amid slow home sales across Southern California. Condos have seen a 6% drop in year-over sales, hindered in part by stricter lending and insurance standards from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac following the 2019 collapse of a condo tower in Surfside, Florida.

"An association is either in great, average or poor financial condition," said Scott Brady, president of brokerage Progressive Partners, which owns HOASnapshot. “A buyer has the right to know, and the seller has the legal obligation to disclose these facts.”

Results grade the HOA on a four-point scale going from healthy to dangerous, determined by key areas like insurance coverage, membership fees, pending litigation and delinquencies, offering buyers red flags to look out for in dense HOA paperwork they are legally required to read.

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When entered into the software, the paperwork travels through multiple language models trained by hundreds of questions related to HOAs and becomes sorted into categories and ratings across four pages. If a final algorithm detects a discrepancy among the four preliminary AI readers, a Progressive employee will determine the accurate option.

Joseph Chiavatti, director of technology at Progressive Partners, says that process differentiates HOASnapshot from generic language models like ChatGPT and Claude, untrained on the specificities of real estate dynamics.

"Too many delinquencies [in an association] make it hard to get a mortgage," Chiavatti said. "We train them how to look for a domino effect."

He added that because buying a condo is often the first step to homeownership, the product works as a tool to guide and educate a buyer navigate risks that could affect those longer-term goals.

While HOA documents can cost more than $1,000, they are free to the buyer when a sale enters escrow. Sales agents can circumvent those fees, requesting them from the seller directly, or a third party document site. Brady said the seller doesn’t have to agree to provide the report unless they’ve pulled one for their own marketing and disclosure purposes.

Progressive, which paid CAR for its endorsement, hopes to see the product ultimately become available on-demand to interested homebuyers even before they enter escrow.

Brady at Progressive noted that a liability waiver protects the brokerage from litigation from buyers who may have received reports based on deceptive HOA records. The company’s adherence to reserve studies and balances supporting the HOASnapshot reviews would protect them from litigation should an HOA file suit over an unflattering report, Brady said.

Ali Govahi at Tustin-based Seven Gables, which tested the program, said he’d pay for the rating service himself if he could help buyers make an informed choice while entering escrow.

“The quality of decisions that those buyers make will be better,” Govahi said. “Confidence will go up, and you can't put a price on that.”

But that confidence could harbor false hope, says Kelly Richardson, principal of Richardson Ober LLP, a California law firm known for offering community association advice, and a monthly contributing writer to the Southern California News Group.

A tight rating system may be unable to fully characterize an organization's quality, he said, such as analyzing reserves without the context of what they should be.

Cautioning that users engage in the platform “with a grain of salt,” he noted that entering an HOA will always carry a degree of uncertainty.

"There are risks in real estate, there are risks inside the walls, under the foundations, and a certain amount of risks just cannot reasonably be eliminated," Richardson said.

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This story was originally published April 24, 2026 at 8:18 AM.