Mississippi Condo Assessment Liens Expire After One Year and Foreclose by Power of Sale; Covenant HOAs Get No Statutory Lien

The threshold question in Mississippi is which kind of community you live in, because the answer changes completely. Condominiums are governed by Title 89, Chapter 9, the 1964 condominium law running from § 89-9-1 to § 89-9-37. Ordinary subdivisions run by a homeowners association are governed by their recorded covenants and by general contract and property law; Mississippi has enacted no planned-community act, no common interest ownership act, and no assessment-lien statute for covenant communities. The only sections in the Mississippi Code that name a homeowners association are § 79-11-759, which requires fidelity bond or comparable insurance coverage for the directors, officers, employees and agents of a homeowners association under the Nonprofit Corporation Act, and §§ 21-33-551 through 21-33-561, which let municipalities create special local improvement assessment districts and let associations act within them. None of those creates a lien for unpaid dues.

Inside the condominium regime, the lien is created by recording rather than by non-payment. Section 89-9-21 begins by making a reasonable assessment made in accordance with a declaration of restrictions recorded under § 89-9-17 "a debt of the owner thereof at the time the assessment is made." The debt becomes a lien only when the management body causes a notice of assessment to be recorded in the office of the chancery clerk of the county where the condominium is located. The notice must state the amount of the assessment, any other charges authorised by the declaration, a description of the condominium assessed and the name of the record owner, and it must be signed and verified by an authorised representative of the management body or as the declaration otherwise provides. The clerk keeps these in a condominium lien book indexed alphabetically by unit owner name. When the debt is paid or otherwise satisfied, the management body must record a further notice of satisfaction and release.

The charges that ride along with the lien are whatever the declaration allows. The section names interest, costs, attorneys' fees and penalties, but it caps none of them and sets no minimum balance before a notice may be recorded. Nor does § 89-9-21 require the association to give the owner advance notice, a cure period or a hearing before recording. The statutory limits are elsewhere: § 89-9-29 A. confines an owner's liability for common expenses to the amounts for which he is assessed from time to time in accordance with the chapter and the declaration, so an assessment outside the declaration is not a debt at all, and the section's own word "reasonable" qualifies the assessment that can become a lien.

Priority is narrower than the super-priority some states grant. The lien is prior to all other liens recorded after the notice of assessment, and the declaration may subordinate it further to other liens and encumbrances. A first mortgage recorded years earlier therefore outranks it. The one-year expiry is the sharpest limit in the section: unless the lien is sooner satisfied and released, or enforcement has been initiated, it expires and is of no further force one year from the date the notice of assessment was recorded, and the management body may extend that period only once, for no more than one additional year, and only by recording a written extension. A dormant condominium lien in Mississippi dies on its own.

Foreclosure is non-judicial. The lien may be enforced by sale by the management body, its attorney or another person authorised to make the sale, conducted in accordance with § 89-1-55, the statute governing powers of sale in mortgages and deeds of trust, or in any other manner permitted by law. Section 89-1-55 requires that the land be sold at public outcry in the county where it is located or in the county of the grantor's residence, that the sale be advertised for three consecutive weeks in a newspaper published in the county, or one of general circulation if none is published there, and that one notice be posted at the courthouse for the same period. The advertisement must disclose the name of the original mortgagor, and the section states that no sale is valid unless advertised as provided "regardless of any contract to the contrary." Unless the declaration says otherwise, the management body may bid the unit in at its own foreclosure sale and then hold, lease, mortgage and convey it, and under § 89-9-31(2) the declaration's provisions survive and remain enforceable after a deed issued on foreclosure of an assessment or lien. Section 89-9-21 also preserves the association's alternative route: suit for a money judgment for unpaid assessments may be maintained without waiving the lien securing the same.

For a condominium owner in arrears the sequence is recording, then sale. The management body records a verified notice of assessment with the chancery clerk, which fixes the lien and its amount including declaration-authorised interest, costs, attorneys' fees and penalties. If the owner still does not pay, the body or its attorney may sell the unit at public outcry under § 89-1-55 after three consecutive weeks of newspaper advertisement and a courthouse posting naming the original mortgagor, with no court filing required. limits liability for common expenses to what was properly assessed, the lien loses priority to anything already on record, the advertising requirement cannot be waived by contract, and the lien lapses one year after recording unless enforcement has been initiated or a written extension of up to one additional year has been recorded.

Owners in a covenant-run Mississippi subdivision face a different route entirely, since no statute gives their association a lien: the association must rely on whatever the recorded covenants create and on an ordinary suit for the debt.