How the structure works
A lot of master-planned communities in this valley operate on two tiers.
The master association covers the regional stuff: the trail network, the community parks, the landscaped medians on the arterials, the large shared amenities. Every homeowner inside the master plan pays it, whether they live in a townhome or on a half acre.
The sub-association covers your specific neighborhood inside that master plan. The gate on your street, your pool, the front yard maintenance if your particular product type includes it.
Summerlin, Green Valley and Lake Las Vegas all commonly run some version of this. The two fees are billed separately, often by different management companies, and listing portals frequently pull whichever one is populated in the MLS field. Sometimes that is the master fee, sometimes the sub, and the portal has no way to tell you it is showing you a partial number.
Why this matters more than it used to
Nationally, the share of listings carrying a non-zero HOA fee has climbed from 34.3% in 2019 to 43.6%, with a median fee of $135 a month as of 2025. In Nevada, roughly half of all homeowners live under an association, and essentially every community built in the last decade has one.
Fees are also rising, and not arbitrarily. Insurance costs for associations have gone up sharply, along with labor and materials for the maintenance they are contractually obligated to perform. An association with a fixed budget and rising costs has two options, and one of them is your dues.
What that looks like when it goes badly
The most instructive local example I can point to is Bavington Court, where the association proposed taking monthly dues from $275 to $490. More than 150 homeowners packed the meeting and voted the increase down. They then received an email from an attorney stating they would owe the higher amount regardless.
Whatever the eventual legal outcome, the lesson for a buyer is the part worth internalizing: your vote at an HOA meeting is not the same as control over your carrying cost. Governing documents, reserve obligations and state law all sit above the show of hands in the room.
The three documents that tell you the truth
Before writing an offer on anything in an association, I want three things in front of my client.
- The reserve study. This is the association's assessment of what its major components are worth, how long they have left, and whether the reserve fund is on pace to replace them. If the reserves are thin and the roofs are fifteen years old, the dues are going up or a special assessment is coming. That is not a prediction, it is arithmetic.
- Twelve months of meeting minutes. Minutes tell you what the board is actually arguing about. Litigation, deferred maintenance, a management company change, an insurance renewal that came in high. The financial statements tell you where things stand, the minutes tell you where they are heading.
- The special assessment history. An association that has levied three assessments in six years has a structural budgeting problem, not a run of bad luck.
Nevada requires the seller to provide a resale disclosure package, and there is a fee attached to producing it. It contains most of this. What I find is that buyers receive it, see two hundred pages, and skim. That package is the single most useful document in the transaction and it arrives at exactly the moment nobody wants to read anything.
The honest counterweight
I am not anti-HOA, and I want to be clear about that, because posts like this tend to read as one-sided.
The fee is buying something. In a condo or townhome, the master policy covering the building envelope is frequently a large share of the dues, and you would be paying for that coverage yourself on a detached home. Gated access, maintained common areas, a pool you do not personally have to service, sometimes trash and water. Deed restrictions that stop the house next door from becoming something you did not sign up for cut both ways, and plenty of buyers want them.
There are also communities in this valley where the dues have been effectively flat for years because the board is competent and the reserves are funded. Those exist and they are worth finding.
The problem is not the existence of a fee. The problem is a fee you did not know about until the lender ran your debt-to-income and the number moved.
What to do
When you are comparing two homes, ask your agent to confirm whether each is in a single or dual association structure, and get both numbers before you emotionally commit to either property. It takes one phone call and it changes the comparison more often than people expect.
If you want the current fee structure for a specific community, send me the address or the neighborhood name. I will pull both tiers and tell you what the trend has looked like over the past few years, which is usually the more useful number.
