HOA and condo association loans in Colorado

CCIOA gives your association the general power to borrow. Section 38-33.3-302(1)(e) lets it make contracts and incur liabilities.

The limit sits one paragraph later. Section 38-33.3-302(1)(n) lets an association assign its right to future income, including the right to receive common expense assessments, but only to the extent the declaration expressly so provides. An association loan is normally secured by exactly that assignment, so in Colorado your declaration is the document that decides whether the usual structure is open to you.

Check it before anything else, because it is the one thing that can stop a loan outright rather than slow it down. If your declaration is silent, the route is an amendment, and an amendment takes a vote and time. A board that finds this out early has options. A board that finds it out during underwriting has a delay.

This is the point most often reported wrongly. Section 38-33.3-209.5(1)(b)(IX) requires your association to adopt a written policy covering when it has a reserve study prepared, whether there is a funding plan for the work that study recommends, where that funding would come from, and whether the study rests on both a physical and a financial analysis.

What it does not do is require the study. The same provision says that an internally conducted reserve study is sufficient, so a board that prepares its own numbers has met the statute. Colorado leaves the depth of the work to you and asks only that you have decided, in writing, how you approach it.

That latitude is real, and it is worth separating from what underwriting asks for. Meeting the statute and presenting a project a lender can price are different bars, and an internally prepared study can clear the first without clearing the second.

House Bill 26-1099 took effect on 12 August 2026, and it changes what a newly transitioned Colorado association starts life with. Before control passes from the declarant to the association, the declarant must now commission and pay for a reserve study covering the common elements and property the association will be responsible for maintaining, repairing or replacing. The study has to project costs over a 30-year period.

The act also says who may prepare it. Section 38-33.3-209.2(3) requires an independent reserve study professional, or another qualified professional, who knows industry standards for reserve studies, who has no business relationship with or financial interest in the declarant beyond being retained to do the study, and who is not an affiliate of the declarant.

Two related duties come with it. The declarant has to deliver the study to the association at turnover under section 38-33.3-303(9)(n), and the association has to make its most recent study available to owners each year under section 38-33.3-209.4(2)(j).

One limit is worth knowing. The new section names planned communities and condominiums, so a housing cooperative is outside it even though CCIOA otherwise treats all three alike.

For a board that has just taken over, this is among the most useful documents you will be handed: a 30-year cost schedule prepared by someone the statute requires to be independent of the developer. It is the natural starting point for deciding what to fund from reserves, what to raise, and what to borrow. If your community transitioned before August 2026 the requirement does not reach you, and the same exercise is worth doing anyway.

Section 38-33.3-303(2.5) applies the standard of care in section 7-128-401 to the officers and board members of an association when they invest reserve funds, reading corporation as the association and director as a board member. Anyone the board delegates responsibility to, including a managing agent, attorney or accountant, is held to the same standard.

That bears on a funding decision more than it first appears. A board weighing whether to spend reserves on a project, or borrow against future assessments and leave the reserves invested, is making a decision the statute already treats as a fiduciary one.

Section 38-33.3-312 governs conveying the common elements or subjecting them to a security interest. It requires agreement from owners holding at least 67 percent of the votes in the association, including 67 percent of the votes allocated to units a declarant does not own, or a larger share if your declaration sets one. Where a limited common element is involved, every owner it is allocated to has to agree.

The agreement has to be executed in the same way as a deed, it has to name a date after which it lapses without the required approval, and any resulting grant or deed has to be recorded in every county the community sits in.

Whether a particular loan structure engages this section is not something this page can answer for you, and we are not going to guess at it. It turns on how your loan is secured and on what your own declaration says. Put it to your association's attorney before you sign anything.