Wyoming HOA Lien Foreclosure: No Statutory Lien, No Super-Priority, Three Months to Redeem

Start with the structural point, because it decides everything else. Title 34 of the Wyoming statutes runs to thirty chapters covering deeds, mortgages, deeds of trust, foreclosure, marketable title, platting, solar rights, wind energy rights, private transfer fees and digital assets. None of them is a planned community act, a common interest ownership act or a homeowners association act. Wyoming did not enact the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act or the Uniform Condominium Act. Its Condominium Ownership Act contains exactly four sections: a short title, recognition of condominium ownership as a fee simple estate in air space plus an undivided interest in common elements, definitions, and a section on notice to the county assessor and recording of the declaration. Searching Title 17, which holds the Wyoming Nonprofit Corporation Act that most associations are incorporated under, returns no reference to a homeowners association or an owners association at all. There is no super-priority provision anywhere, because there is no statutory lien for one to attach to.

The lien an association records is therefore a creature of the declaration. W.S. 34-20-104(c) is what makes it stick: where a declaration mandates that all condominium unit owners be members of an association or corporation, or provides for the payment of charges assessed by the association upon condominium units, any rule of law to the contrary notwithstanding, those provisions are covenants running with the land binding upon all condominium owners and their successors in interest. A buyer takes subject to them whether or not the buyer read them. Wyoming's own drafters treat the resulting security as contractual: W.S. 34-30-102(a)(iv)(B), in the Uniform Mortgage Modification Act that governs modifications made on or after July 1, 2026, defines mortgage to exclude an agreement creating a consensual interest to secure a unit owner's liability to a condominium association, owners' association or cooperative housing association for dues, fees or assessments.

Because the lien is consensual rather than statutory, priority runs on ordinary recording order. A first mortgage recorded before the declaration lien outranks it, and the reverse is equally true. Nothing in Wyoming law carves out six months of assessments ahead of a first mortgage in the way the UCIOA states do.

Foreclosure is where the limits bite. W.S. 34-4-101 leaves the parties free to provide in the instrument as they see fit as to the manner of foreclosure and sale, and where they have, foreclosure may proceed either that way or under the chapter. W.S. 34-4-102(a) then permits foreclosure by advertisement only for an instrument containing a power of sale, and only within ten years after the maturing of the obligation or after recording. An association whose declaration grants no power of sale cannot advertise and sell at all; it must sue on the covenant, take judgment, and rely on W.S. 1-17-302, under which lands and tenements within the county are bound from the day the judgment is filed with the county clerk and recorded in the real estate records.

The conditions in W.S. 34-4-103(a) are strict. There must be a default that made the power to sell operative. No suit or proceeding may have been instituted at law to recover the debt, or if one was, it must have been discontinued or the execution returned unsatisfied in whole or in part, so an association that has already sued for the money has closed the advertisement route until it unwinds that case. The instrument and every assignment must be recorded. And written notice of intent to foreclose must be served by certified mail with return receipt on the record owner, and on the person in possession if different, at least ten days before publication of the notice of sale begins, proved by affidavit.

W.S. 34-4-104(a) requires the sale notice to be published for four consecutive weeks, at least once each week, in a newspaper printed in the county, and before the first publication a copy must go by certified mail to the record owner, the person in possession, and all holders of recorded mortgages and liens subordinate to the one being foreclosed, at least twenty-five days before the scheduled sale. W.S. 34-4-105(a) fixes six required contents, including a statement that the property may be subject to other liens and encumbrances that will not be extinguished at the sale. W.S. 34-4-106 puts the sale at public vendue between ten in the morning and five in the afternoon at the front door of the courthouse or the place of holding district court, conducted by the person named in the instrument or by the sheriff, and voids any sale held without the foreclosing mortgagee, judgment creditor or other foreclosing lienor present or having waived the right to appear and bid. A void sale does not exhaust the lien; it can be redone properly. Where the sale produces a surplus, W.S. 34-4-104(b) requires the foreclosing party to serve the sale results on the owner and every subordinate lienholder within ten business days.

The owner's protections are all downstream of the sale. S. 1-18-103(a) gives the owner, heirs, executors, administrators, assigns or guarantors three months from the date of sale to redeem, by paying the purchase price or the amount bid together with interest at ten percent per annum from the date of sale plus any assessments, taxes and prior liens the purchaser has paid since, at which point the sale and certificate are void and a certificate of redemption issues. S. 1-18-103(c) as a parcel over eighty acres outside any incorporated city, town or recorded subdivision, or property used substantially for agricultural purposes aggregating eighty acres, carries twelve months instead.

S. 1-18-104(a) lets any judgment creditor, grantee, mortgagee or other lienholder redeem on or before the thirtieth day after the redemption period expires. S. S. 1-20-102(b) gives each of two or more persons who jointly own and occupy the residence their own exemption, so a couple occupying together shields $200,000 against a money judgment for unpaid assessments. S. 1-20-102(a).