Many communities require an architectural review committee (ARC) to approve construction on a property: a shed, a pool, a deck, new fencing, a roof color. Committee review turns an architectural request into a vote. The committee is notified when a request arrives, each member records a decision, and the request is approved or denied once the votes meet the rules your community sets.
Every association runs this differently, so almost everything is configurable: who votes, how many must take part, what carries a decision, how long you have to decide, and whether the applicant can watch. Nothing changes until you turn it on.
Configuring committee review and publishing decisions require the Manage Request Review permission. Voting does not require a permission: anyone on the committee roster can vote, which keeps the roster the single place you manage membership. Viewing all community requests requires the View Community Requests permission, though committee members can always open the requests they are being asked to vote on, whether or not they hold it.
In the main navigation menu, expand Requests and click Architectural.
Click the gear icon in the top-right corner to open Architectural Review settings.
Start with one of three presets. Most communities pick one and never open the rest of the page.
Single reviewer: A leader approves or denies directly, with no vote. This is how architectural requests work before you change anything, so leaving it selected keeps your current process exactly as it is.
Committee vote: The committee decides by majority, with a quorum.
Committee recommends: The committee votes, then the board ratifies the result.
The card header on each request states which of these applies, so a recommendation is never mistaken for a final ruling.
Pick an existing member group as the voting roster, such as your Architectural Committee group. Using a group means turnover looks after itself: add or remove people from the group and the committee follows, with no request to update.
The roster preview shows exactly who would be voting right now.
Chair: pick one, from the roster itself. The chair marks an application ready for review, publishes the committee's decision, schedules and records a hearing, and publishes an appeal outcome. Leave it blank and those four fall to anyone holding Manage Request Review, which is explicit and visible in Roles & Permissions.
Being a group admin has nothing to do with being chair. Group admin controls who may add and remove members of the group, a group can have several, and a role has none at all. Chair decides who publishes, so it is named rather than inferred.
Open groups cannot be used. Any resident can join an open group instantly, which would let them give themselves a vote on a neighbor's request.
Members with a pending invitation to the community, or a pending request to join the group, do not count toward quorum and cannot vote.
Quorum: The minimum number of votes before a result counts at all. Set as a number or a percentage of the roster.
Threshold: What share carries the decision. Choose a majority of the votes cast, a majority of the whole roster, a set percentage, or unanimous.
If the vote ties: The chair breaks the tie, it goes to the board, it is recorded as denied, or it stays open.
When the threshold is reached: Hold for the chair to publish a written decision, or decide automatically.
Abstentions count toward quorum but toward neither side of the threshold, which matches how a committee meeting actually runs. Each request states the rule in plain words underneath the vote count, so nobody has to remember the configuration.
Approve and Deny are always available. You can additionally enable Approve with conditions and Request more information.
Under Can the applicant watch the vote?, choose whether the applicant sees votes as they come in or whether committee deliberation stays private until a decision is published. Private is the default. Either way the published decision is always shown to the applicant.
Under Review window, set how many days the committee has to decide. Leave it blank for no deadline.
The clock starts either when the request is submitted, or when the application is marked ready for review. Many governing documents use the second, because a half-finished application should not start a countdown.
A running clock pauses automatically whenever a request is sent back to the applicant for more information, and restarts when they respond, extended by exactly the time they took. A window that has not started yet has nothing to pause, and still begins when the application is marked ready.
When the window closes with no decision, you can do nothing, notify the committee, or approve the request automatically.
Under Intake, you can name the form architectural requests should come in on, and list the documents an application needs before the committee looks at it.
Intake form: choose the form, then decide whether it is a suggestion or a requirement. Suggest points people at the form but lets a request through without it. Require sends the New Request button to the form for everyone, leaders included, and the request cannot be created any other way. Leaders keep a menu beside it: File for myself goes to the same form, because a leader applying about their own property is applying like anybody else, and File for a member opens the manual form, which is the one case a required form cannot serve: an application that arrived by phone or on paper for someone else's household.
Required documents: a checklist you define once, such as a site plan, a survey, contractor insurance, or a neighbor's acknowledgement. Each request shows the list with what is still outstanding, and the applicant sees it too. Being told "your application is incomplete" is no use without being told what is short.
Hold the review until the checklist is complete: when this is on, Mark ready for review is refused while a required item is unticked. This turns "ready for review" from one person's judgement into a check against your own list. It also holds an approval: you cannot approve an application your own community calls incomplete, and that stands however the approval is reached, including automatically. Denying is still available, and so is asking for what is missing, because a missing survey is an ordinary reason to refuse and the owner keeps a remedy either way.
Items can be marked received or waived. Waiving asks for a reason, because a waiver is a decision somebody made and should be legible years later, and only a leader can clear one: an applicant undoing a waiver would be overturning the association's own ruling.
The two sides tick an item for different reasons, so they work differently. When the applicant answers a required item they point it at the file they attached, and the checklist then names that file. A tick with nothing behind it satisfies the gate that holds the review clock, and that gate exists to hold this exact person. When a leader marks something received they are attesting the association has it, by email, at a meeting, or already on file, so they are not asked for an attachment. That is the way in for everything that does not arrive as an upload.
Under Appeals, decide whether an owner can ask for a decision to be reconsidered. In several states this is a statutory right rather than a courtesy. It is off by default, which is how architectural review has always worked: a decision was final.
Who hears an appeal: usually your board. It should not be the same people who made the decision, though some associations genuinely have nobody else. The page shows you who that works out to be, and marks anyone who also sits on the committee, so picking a broad role does not quietly make two hundred people the appeal body. Where the two bodies overlap you are told, including when the committee chair is among them, since they published the decision being appealed. These are warnings, not refusals: a small association with one body can save the page and carry on.
Who chairs the appeal body: pick one the same way, from that body's own membership. They schedule the hearing and publish the outcome. Without one, both fall to Manage Request Review.
Which decisions can be appealed: denials only, denials and conditional approvals, or any decision.
How an appeal is decided: a vote by the appeal body, or a hearing the owner can attend. Both work; pick what your governing documents describe.
Deadlines: how long the owner has to appeal, counted from the decision, and how long the body then has to decide it.
Once appeals are on, every decision that can be appealed carries the appeal paragraph automatically, in the email and on any letter you send, with a real date rather than "within 30 days". A deadline the reader has to work out is a deadline they will get wrong.
These appear only when appeals are decided at a hearing.
Notice before the hearing: a hearing cannot be scheduled sooner than this. It is the owner's right to be told before they have to turn up and argue, so it is enforced rather than suggested.
Aim to hear within: counted from the appeal being filed. A later date is flagged when you set it, not blocked. Once you are already past the window, every remaining date breaks it, and refusing them all would leave the owner with no hearing at all.
Postponements: how far a postponement can move the hearing, and how many each side may take. The owner and the appeal body get the allowance separately, so a board that used its own has not used up the owner's.
Put the hearing on a calendar: off by default. You can show it to the appeal body only, or post it to the whole community. Posting it publicly is what an open-meeting rule asks for, and it also tells every neighbor which property is being argued about, so it is a choice you make deliberately.
Under After approval, you can require work to start within so many days and finish within so many more. Approvals commonly expire if nothing happens, and the dates appear on the request as a countdown once it is approved.
The count starts at the decision, or, where appeals are enabled with a window, when that window closes. Work should not be expected to start while the decision can still be overturned. The request states which applies.
Reminders: choose how many days ahead to remind the owner. They also get one notice when a deadline passes, and then nothing further.
Extensions: allow a leader to push the dates out with a note. The extension and its reason are recorded on the request.
The owner can report that work has started or finished, and a leader can confirm it. Both are kept, and the request says which it has: "the owner says they are done" and "we went and looked" are different facts, and only one of them settles anything.
Under Mailed notices, choose whether a printed notice can be posted to the applicant, and whether certified mail is offered. Some states accept certified mail as delivery of a denial, and the tracking number is the proof.
Nothing here ever sends anything. The setting only decides whether the option appears, or arrives pre-ticked on a denial. Postage is charged to your community, so a person always reads the notice and presses the button.
Architectural requests can be submitted the usual way, or through a form. Building a form is the better option for architectural review, because you can require exactly what a reviewer needs: a description of the work, materials and colors, a site plan or survey, photographs, contractor details, and estimated start and completion dates. Point the form's Create a request action at the architectural type and each submission arrives as a request with the committee already notified and the files attached. See "Collecting Requests Through a Form" for the setup.
Where you have listed required documents, the New Request form shows them before anything is submitted, under What this application needs. Nothing there blocks filing. A resident who cannot yet lay hands on a survey must still be able to start, or the checklist becomes a reason people never file at all.
A leader filing on somebody's behalf is asked Who is this for?, and can name the resident who asked or leave it as the household. It is not a formality: the applicant is who an appeal is filed for and who the record names years later, and an application taken over the phone is the one case nothing else can work it out from. Residents filing for their own home are not asked, because the answer is already known.
If your clock starts on completeness, the chair or a leader clicks Mark ready for review once the application has everything the committee needs. This starts the review window. It does not hold up voting: the committee can start looking while one document is outstanding.
Each committee member opens the request and records one of: Approve, Approve with conditions, Deny, or Abstain. A denial or a conditional approval must say why, and that reason is shown to the applicant with the decision. The reason travels; the name behind it does not, unless the community has chosen to let applicants watch the vote.
Votes can be changed at any time until the decision is published.
Once the vote reaches a result, the chair publishes it. The applicant is emailed the outcome along with the conditions or the reasons behind it, and the request closes. That happens however the decision is reached, including when the last vote carries it automatically or the review deadline approves it.
The written basis starts filled in, from what the committee already wrote on the ballots that voted that way, without their names. Edit it freely: it is what the owner reads, and it goes out over the chair's name. Ballots cast against plans that have since been revised are left out, because they answered a different question.
Approve or Approve with conditions, where the conditions are recorded alongside the approval.
Deny, which requires naming the guideline the denial rests on and which part of the proposal fails it. Both are shown to the applicant and form the written basis for the decision. Some states require exactly this, and a denial with no stated reason is what appeals are built on.
Request more information sits separately, below the decision buttons, because it does not decide anything. The request stays open, the votes already cast are kept, and the review clock pauses until the applicant responds. The applicant is emailed what you have asked for, and sees it on the request itself. Until they reply, the committee's card shows the request as waiting on them rather than prompting anyone to vote.
Once a decision is published, a leader with the Send Request Notices permission can draft and post it. Click through to the notice, read the draft, edit it, and send.
The draft is assembled from what was actually decided rather than left blank: the outcome, the guideline relied on, the part of the proposal that fails it, what changes would make it approvable, and the appeal rights with a real date. A chair composing that from memory, letter after letter, will eventually leave one out, and the one they leave out is the one that gets challenged.
Where you have set deadlines for approved work, an approved request keeps a short tracker: Approved, Started, Finished, Signed off. The dates it counts against are shown with it, along with what they were counted from.
The owner reports that work has started and that it is complete. They are the ones doing it, and making a leader record every start is how a deadline stops being tracked at all.
A leader records the final inspection: does what was built match what was approved? Answer Built as approved or Differs from the approval. A deviation has to say what differs, because a finding nobody wrote down is a finding nobody can act on, and the owner is shown it.
Only the association can record an inspection. An owner attesting that their own work complies is the situation an inspection exists to replace.
Until somebody looks, the request says so. "Nobody has checked" and "we checked and it is fine" are different answers and must not read alike.
Recording a deviation changes nothing about the approval. It is a finding, not a penalty: the request stays approved, the decision stays as published, and no date moves. What a deviation means is a decision for a person, and if it needs enforcing the tool for that is a violation, raised deliberately.
This is the step that makes the rest of it worth having. Without it, "work is complete" is recorded by whoever clicked it, and the file says a great deal less than it appears to.
An applicant can withdraw a request at any point before it is decided. They sold the house, they took the contractor's advice, or they are going to redraw and come back.
The request closes without a decision and appears under a Withdrawn filter rather than sitting in Pending forever.
The property record shows it as withdrawn, not denied. Recording it as a denial would leave a permanent mark on an address saying the association refused something it never actually considered.
The review clock stops, and the committee is told, in case anyone had work in progress.
A leader can record a withdrawal that arrived by phone or in person, and can reopen one recorded in error. Reopening puts the review back where it was and adds the time it spent withdrawn back onto the deadline.
Once a decision has been published there is nothing left to withdraw. What the applicant has then is an appeal.
When appeals are enabled, a decided request carries an Appeal card. The applicant sees the deadline and a button; the appeal body sees what has been filed.
The applicant files within the window, and must say why. An appeal that says nothing gives the body nothing to weigh and leaves the appellant with no record of what they argued. A leader can record an appeal that arrived on paper, so an association whose owners do not use the app can still honor the right.
Filing reopens the request, because it is genuinely undecided again until the body rules. The committee's own record is untouched: their decision, their reasons and their vote stay exactly as they were, whatever happens next.
The appeal body votes the way the committee did, against the same quorum and threshold, on its own card. A board member who also sits on the architectural committee keeps both ballots; voting on the appeal does not overwrite how they voted the first time.
Where your community holds hearings instead, the appeal body sets a date and place. The owner and the body are both notified, and both are reminded as it approaches.
Scheduling must give the owner the full notice period. Moving the date later re-applies it, because the owner is being told afresh when to appear.
Postponing is different: it is the owner's or the body's right to put an already-noticed hearing off by a short period, limited to the allowance each side has. It does not re-start the notice period.
You can draft and mail a printed notice of hearing, which states the date, the place, that the owner may attend and be heard, and their right to postpone.
After the hearing, record who attended and what happened. The minutes are kept whether or not the body decides that day, because a body routinely hears a matter and takes it under advisement.
The appeal body records whether the decision is affirmed, modified or reversed, in whole or in part, and what the request becomes. Affirming means the original stands and cannot quietly change the outcome. A denial that survives or arrives on appeal still owes a written basis, because the applicant has now been refused twice.
The applicant is notified, and so is the original committee. Being reversed without hearing about it is how a committee finds out from the homeowner instead.
An appellant can withdraw their appeal, which leaves the committee's decision standing. Resubmitting a changed proposal is a new request, not a second appeal.
A committee member who lives at the property under review is recused automatically. They cannot vote, they are removed from the quorum count so they do not hold the vote up, and they cannot see the committee's private discussion of their own request. This applies to everyone in that household, not only the person who filed it.
The same rule applies to the appeal body. A board member whose own household filed the appeal sits it out.
Filing a request on someone's behalf does not make you a party to it. A leader who enters an application for a resident still votes normally, and the request shows the household as the applicant with a note that you filed it.
If the application is edited or its documents change after voting has started, Communitrak records a new revision and the votes already cast stop counting. Each reviewer sees that the plans changed, which revision they voted on, and is asked to look again.
This matters because a vote is consent to a specific set of plans. Without it, an approval recorded against one drawing could quietly carry over to a different one. The published decision names the revision it was made on, so an old approval says what was approved rather than just that something was.
Architectural requests are recorded against the property, not the household. When a home changes hands, the history stays at the address.
On a property's page, the Request History card lists everything filed for that address.
On an architectural request, click Property history under the address to see prior requests for the same property.
Each entry shows the outcome, the date, any conditions, and the vote it rested on.
A request that went to appeal reads as one entry with both halves, such as "Denied, reversed on appeal", rather than two rows disagreeing with each other.
A withdrawn request reads as withdrawn, in neutral, beside the denials in red.
This is what lets you answer "was the deck at 42 Oak ever approved?" years later, for an owner who was not the applicant.
Committee review is configured per request type. You can vote on architectural requests while leaving maintenance on a single reviewer.
Every capability on this page is off until you turn it on. A community that has never opened these settings behaves exactly as it always has.
Appeal rules are read live right up to the moment an appeal is filed, so enabling appeals this week lets you offer one on a decision published today. From filing onward they are frozen: the notice period and the postponement allowance are the terms somebody has already acted on, and changing the settings will not move them.
A hearing time is always your community's local time, on screen and on the notice, whatever timezone the person reading it is in.
Withdrawing is available on general and maintenance requests too, not only architectural ones. A violation cannot be withdrawn: it is something the association raised, not something the owner asked for.
Turning committee review on does not affect requests already decided. Requests still pending can be sent to the committee from the request itself.
Changing quorum or threshold does not re-decide a vote already in progress. Each request keeps the rules that applied when it opened.
Changing the review deadline settings does apply to open requests, but never retroactively: switching on a 30-day window will not instantly expire a request that has been open longer.
While the vote is private, the applicant sees that the request is with the committee, and the decision once it is published, but not who voted or how.
The Approve and Deny buttons that appear on architectural requests without committee review are hidden once a committee owns the outcome, so a single leader cannot bypass a vote in progress.
Committee members are notified in the app, by push, and by email when a request needs their vote, following each member's own notification preferences.
The applicant is notified the same way, following their own preferences, whenever a decision is published or the committee asks them for more information.
Reminders about hearings and approval deadlines are sent once each. A community reminded four times about the same date learns to ignore us.
If your community's account is read-only because of a billing issue, voting and publishing are disabled until the account is back in good standing.
If you have questions or need help, chat with Communitrak Support from any page using the messenger icon in the bottom-right corner.
