What VA approves
VA's condominium requirement is short and absolute: "Before the Secretary will guarantee a loan on an individual unit, the legal documentation establishing the condominium project or development must be approved by the Secretary." That is 38 CFR 36.4360, as the regulation stood on 12 August 2026.
Read it carefully, because the object of the approval is unusual. FHA approves a project against eligibility criteria. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac certify that a project meets purchase standards. VA approves the project's legal documents. The declaration, the bylaws and the enabling instruments are examined against a body of regulation that specifies what rights unit owners must have and what restrictions may not exist. It is closer to a title and covenant review than to an underwriting exercise.
The standards themselves sit in regulation rather than principally in a handbook, which is a genuine structural difference from every other rulebook in this area. The relevant sections are 38 CFR 36.4360 (condominium loans, general), 36.4361 (acceptable ownership arrangements and documentation), 36.4362 (rights and restrictions), 36.4363 (miscellaneous legal requirements), 36.4364 (flexible condominiums and condominiums with offsite facilities) and 36.4365 (appraisal requirements). Section 36.4360 also confirms that VA condominium loans are guaranteed "to the same extent and on the same terms as other loans," with limited exceptions, and supplies the definitional framework — proposed, existing resale, expandable, horizontal, low-rise, high-rise, conversion and series condominiums, along with declarant control relationships — applicable from 1 July 1979.
VA also maintains a policy overlay in its Lenders Handbook, Pamphlet 26-7, at Chapter 16. That chapter could not be retrieved from VA's public document archive for this page, so nothing here is sourced to it; everything below comes from the regulation itself and from VA's own process materials.
The absence that defines VA review
The most useful thing to know about VA condominium approval is what is not in it.
38 CFR 36.4360 through 36.4362 contain no owner-occupancy percentage, no investor-concentration cap and no commercial-space limit. There is no VA equivalent of FHA's 50 percent owner-occupancy standard, no VA equivalent of FHA's 50 percent insurance concentration ceiling, no VA equivalent of the 35 percent commercial floor-area limit that both FHA and the GSEs apply. Those figures simply do not appear in the text of those sections.
This matters more than it sounds. A project with a heavy investor share, or with substantial ground-floor retail, or with a low owner-occupancy count, can fail an FHA or conventional review on a ratio and still be perfectly approvable by VA — because VA is not asking that question. The mirror case also holds: a project with clean finances and a strong owner-occupancy count can fail VA over a single clause in a decades-old declaration that no one has ever read closely.
The one hard numeric requirement found in VA's condominium regulations is a reserve provision, and it is framed quite differently from everyone else's. The association must maintain adequate reserve funds for maintenance of the common elements, and working capital reserves of at least two months' estimated charges per unit. That is a per-unit measure of near-term liquidity, not a percentage-of-budget test like the GSEs' reserve allocation rule and not a percentage-of-annual-assessments test like FHA's.
There is one qualification worth stating honestly. VA's standard submission package includes a presale letter, which implies that some project-completion or presale review happens at the file level. The threshold applied was not found in the regulations or in VA's retrievable process documents, so this page does not assert one.
What must be in the documents, and what may not
Section 36.4361 sets the documentation requirements. The declaration must describe the units, the common elements and the amenities, and clarify maintenance responsibilities. Bylaws and enabling documentation are required. Everything must conform to applicable state condominium law and be recorded as the jurisdiction requires: "The declaration and all amendments or modifications thereof shall be placed of record in the manner prescribed by the appropriate jurisdiction." The documents must be available to unit owners, lenders and prospective purchasers on request, and the owners' association must be able to provide current declarations, bylaws, rules and financial statements. While the declarant still controls the association, amendments to the declaration, bylaws or enabling documents require the Secretary's approval before they are recorded.
Section 36.4362 is where projects most often trip. It sets out rights that must exist and restrictions that are barred:
- Ingress and egress. "There may not be any restriction upon any unit owner's right of ingress and egress to his or her unit."
- Right of first refusal — not permitted in declarations recorded on or after 1 December 1976. This is one of the most common single reasons an older project's documents need amending.
- Restrictions on sale or transfer are prohibited, subject to limited pre-1976 and age-related exceptions.
- Blanket prohibitions on leasing are barred. Minimum lease terms of up to one year are permitted. An association may require twelve-month leases; it may not forbid leasing altogether and remain VA-approvable.
- Age restrictions are permitted where established by government housing programmes.
- Voting must be allocated equally or by other equitable criteria, and each owner's share of common expenses determined by a specified, reasonable method.
- Management contracts must be terminable by the owners' association, exercisable within 90 days.
- Unreasonable reserved rights by the declarant are prohibited, while easements for encroachments arising from construction or settlement are permitted.
Notice how many of these are governance protections rather than financial tests. VA's condominium regulation is largely concerned with whether a unit owner who happens to be a veteran can actually sell, lease, enter and vote on the thing they bought.
How a project gets VA approved
Documents go to a VA Regional Loan Center, which checks the package for completeness and forwards it to VA's National Practice Group for legal review. Notably, and unlike FHA, both lenders and veterans may submit a project for review.
Lenders work through the WebLGY portal, under Loan then Condo. "Search Condo" — where state is a mandatory field — returns approved condominium records read-only; where a project is not found, the lender uses "Create Condo" to submit a new record, and the system generates condo review dates automatically. VA's lender quick reference guide, dated March 2020, prescribes a stacking order for the submission:
- Declaration, then bylaws, then amendments, then plat map, then rules and regulations, then meeting minutes, then budget, then special assessment letter, then litigation letter, then presale letter, then other documents.
VA's own process presentation lists a substantially similar package, adding contact information, articles of incorporation, the last two months of meeting minutes, financials and current budget, and documentation of pending litigation or special assessments.
VA assigns a project one of several statuses: Accepted Without Conditions, Accepted With Conditions, Pending, Rejected, Suspended, Unknown, and a legacy status of HUD Accepted. That last one has a history. Effective 7 December 2009, VA stopped accepting HUD/FHA condominium project appraisals in lieu of its own project review, because FHA's updated requirements no longer aligned with VA's condominium regulations. Projects previously VA-approved through FHA acceptance were grandfathered, which is why the status still appears. VA approval does not ride on FHA approval, and it has not for well over a decade.
Does VA approval expire?
This deserves a careful answer, because the confident version circulating online is not supported by an affirmative source.
What is established: neither 38 CFR 36.4360, nor 36.4361, nor 36.4362 establishes an approval term, an expiration date or a recertification requirement. VA's lender quick reference guide and VA's own condominium process presentation likewise contain no expiration or recertification provisions. There is no VA analogue to FHA's three-year clock anywhere in those materials.
What follows from that is a reasonable inference rather than a VA statement: once VA has approved a project's legal documents, the approval does not carry a fixed expiration and recertification cycle the way FHA's does, and generally stays in place. The flat claim "VA approval never expires" goes further than the sources support, and this page does not make it.
It is also not the same as saying nothing can change. VA applies Suspended and Rejected statuses. And under 36.4361, while the declarant controls the association, amendments to the governing documents require the Secretary's approval before recordation — so the documents that were approved are not free to drift unnoticed during the developer-control period. An association that amends its declaration to add a right of first refusal, or a blanket leasing ban, has changed exactly the thing VA approved.
Where to look, and what the lookup will not tell you
VA's public entry point is the customised condo report at lgy.va.gov/lgyhub/condo-report. Many third-party pages still link to VA's older Veterans Information Portal condo report, which is retired; the current page is the one to use. The working lookup lenders rely on is inside WebLGY, which is not open to the public.
Three limits are worth understanding before reading any result:
- Approval is of the project's legal documents. The unit, the appraisal and the borrower still have to qualify separately.
- "Accepted With Conditions" is not unconditional approval. It is a status with attached conditions, and what those conditions are matters to the transaction.
- It says nothing about FHA, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Four rulebooks, four answers.
If a project is not VA-approved and you need a VA loan, the path is submission — and because both lenders and veterans may submit, a buyer has more standing here than under FHA, where the process is mortgagee-driven. What a buyer cannot usefully do is assess the declaration themselves. Whether a 1974 declaration's transfer clause survives under the pre-1976 exception, or whether a leasing rule is a permitted minimum term or a barred blanket prohibition, is a question for an attorney reading the recorded documents. It is also, frequently, a fixable one: an association willing to amend a single offending clause can convert a rejected project into an approvable one, and that is a far more common outcome than the "not VA approved" label suggests.
Primary sources: 38 CFR 36.4360 and 38 CFR 36.4362.
Common questions
What does VA actually check in a condominium project?
The project's legal documents. Under 38 CFR 36.4360 the legal documentation establishing the project must be approved by the Secretary before VA will guarantee a loan on a unit, and 36.4361 and 36.4362 specify what the declaration and bylaws must contain and which restrictions are barred. VA reviews rights of ingress and egress, transfer restrictions, leasing rules, voting allocation, assessment methodology, management contract termination and reserves.
Does VA have an owner-occupancy or investor requirement?
No such percentage appears in 38 CFR 36.4360 through 36.4362. There is no VA equivalent of FHA's owner-occupancy minimum, no investor-concentration cap and no commercial-space limit in those sections. A presale letter is part of VA's standard submission package, which implies some file-level review of project completion, but the threshold applied was not found in the regulations or VA's published process materials.
Can a condo association ban rentals and still be VA approved?
No. Blanket prohibitions on leasing are barred under 38 CFR 36.4362. An association may impose a minimum lease term of up to one year, which is a common and permitted restriction, but it cannot forbid leasing outright and remain VA-approvable. This is one of the more frequent reasons an otherwise sound project fails VA review.
Does VA condominium approval expire?
VA's regulations at 36.4360 to 36.4362 contain no approval term, expiration date or recertification requirement, and neither VA's lender quick reference guide nor its condominium process presentation establishes one. So VA approval does not carry the fixed three-year cycle FHA's does and generally stays in place. That is verified only by the absence of any such provision, not by an affirmative VA statement, and VA can still suspend or reject a project.
Is a right of first refusal a problem for VA?
Yes, for declarations recorded on or after 1 December 1976, where a right of first refusal is not permitted. Older declarations may fall within limited exceptions. It is one of the most common document defects in mid-century projects, and it is curable by amendment rather than fatal, which is why it is worth having an attorney read the recorded declaration rather than assuming a rejection is permanent.
Does FHA approval make a project VA approved?
No. Effective 7 December 2009, VA stopped accepting HUD/FHA condominium project appraisals in lieu of its own project review, on the basis that FHA's updated requirements no longer aligned with VA's condominium regulations. Projects previously approved through FHA acceptance were grandfathered, which is why a legacy HUD Accepted status still exists in VA's system.