For most of the history of American homebuilding, the homeowners association was a feature of certain communities. Today it is the default setting of new construction. The data is not subtle, and the implication for builders is direct: how you run the community is now part of how you build it.

The headline number

In 2024, 65.7 percent of new single-family homes completed and built for sale were part of a homeowners association, according to Census and NAHB figures. That is roughly two in three new homes. The share peaked at 67.1 percent in 2020 and has held near two-thirds since, up sharply from about 49 percent in 2009.

The regional concentration is even more striking. In the Mountain West, over 80 percent of new single-family homes are built within an HOA. If you are building in those markets, the association is not a question of whether. It is a given, and your buyers already assume it.

The scale behind the trend

Step back from new construction and the footprint is enormous. The numbers describe an entire layer of American housing that runs on community association governance:

• There are about 373,000 community associations in the United States, per the Foundation for Community Association Research.
• Roughly 78.1 million Americans live in them, which is nearly one in four people in the country.
• About 29.6 million U.S. housing units sit inside an HOA, which works out to roughly one in three homes once you count condominiums and co-ops.
• The combined market value of homes in community associations is about 13.1 trillion dollars.
• The U.S. HOA industry generated an estimated 39.9 billion dollars in revenue in 2025.

This is not a niche. It is a structural feature of how the country houses itself, and the builders feeding new supply into it are the ones creating these associations in the first place.

Where the associations are

The concentration follows growth. The states leading in community associations are the same states absorbing the most new construction and migration:

• California, with about 51,700 associations.
• Florida, with about 50,600.
• Texas, with about 23,500.

If you build in the Sun Belt or the Mountain West, you are building in the heart of HOA country. The association is part of the product, whether or not it has your attention.

What it means for builders

Put the new-construction share next to the scale and the conclusion writes itself. If two in three new homes carry an HOA, then for most builders the association is no longer an afterthought to set up at the end of a project. It is an operating entity that exists from the first closing, runs for years under your control, and hands off to homeowners in a transition that can either protect or damage your reputation.

Treating community operations as a structural part of homebuilding changes a few things. It means budgeting the work honestly instead of pretending it disappears. It means setting assessments at a number the community can actually live on, not just a number that helps the sale. It means keeping records from day one because turnover is coming. And it means deciding, deliberately, how the association will be run rather than defaulting to whoever will take it off your plate.

Why the trend is not reversing

It is tempting to read the dip from the 2020 peak as a sign that HOAs are falling out of favor. They are not. The forces that pushed the share of new homes in associations from about 49 percent in 2009 to roughly two-thirds today are structural, not cyclical.

Municipalities increasingly require new developments to form associations so the local government does not inherit the cost of maintaining private streets, stormwater systems, and amenities. Lenders and insurers are comfortable with the model. And density itself pushes in the same direction: the more shared infrastructure a community has, the more it needs an entity to own and maintain it. As long as new construction leans toward planned communities and shared amenities, the association comes with the territory.

For a builder, that means this is not a wave to wait out. The HOA is a fixed feature of the product you are selling, in most markets, for the foreseeable future. The only real choice is how seriously you treat the operating side of it.

The hidden cost of treating it as an afterthought

When community operations is an afterthought, the costs do not disappear. They move. They show up as buyers frustrated by slow answers during the sales process, as a sales team pulled off the floor to handle HOA questions, as a thin reserve that becomes a special assessment after turnover, and as a transition that turns into a dispute. None of those line items appear in the pro forma, but all of them are real, and all of them attach to your name.

The builders who do best with this treat the association the way they treat construction quality: as part of the reputation they carry into the next project. A community that runs smoothly becomes a referral engine. A community that runs badly becomes a story buyers tell each other. With two in three new homes carrying an HOA, that story is being told about most builders now, whether they are paying attention or not.

The operating question

Once you accept that the HOA is structural, the real question is how you run it. The traditional answer is a third-party management company, which solves the labor problem and creates control and incentive problems of its own. Industry turnover in property management runs about 33 percent against a national average closer to 22 percent, so the person who knows your community tends not to stay long. The newer answer is to run the association yourself with software carrying the work.

We lay out the full picture in the complete guide to HOA management for homebuilders, and the honest tradeoff between the two models in self-managed HOA vs. management company. Either way, the data has already made the decision that matters: community operations is here, it is large, and it is part of building now.