Two HOA Laws That Don't Exist — and What Actually Governs South Dakota and Wyoming

"South Dakota's Planned Community Act, S.D.C.L. § 43-15B" is not a real law about homeowners associations. Neither is a "Wyoming Planned Community Ownership Act," cited at two different, equally wrong section numbers. We found both while building state-by-state compliance pages for all 50 states, and both are still circulating today — repeated across a small set of near-identical HOA content sites and, in our own testing this month, synthesized as fact by an AI-generated search summary. This post shows the real law in each state, in the state's own words, and the plain method we used to check all 50: read the statute's own published text and quote it, rather than repeat what other sites say.

I'm not a lawyer. I run the books for a 10-unit condo association in Decatur, Georgia, and GnomeOwner grew out of that — a compliance calendar that shows a board the statute sentence behind every deadline, not just a claim about one. Building the South Dakota and Wyoming pages meant reading each state's actual codified law, section by section, and checking every citation we would normally have trusted secondhand. That's how we found these two.

The South Dakota law that doesn't exist

Search "South Dakota HOA law" and you'll find, on more than one site, a claim that South Dakota regulates homeowners associations through a "Planned Community Act" at S.D.C.L. § 43-15B. We went to South Dakota's own legislature website and fetched Chapter 43-15B directly. Its actual title: Time-Share Estates. Nine sections about timeshare definitions and licensee background checks. Nothing about planned communities, nothing about homeowners associations. South Dakota has no Chapter 43-15C, no Chapter 43-16, and no separate HOA statute of any kind.

What South Dakota does have is a real Condominium Act, S.D.C.L. Chapter 43-15A — and it's a genuinely thin one. Most of its 30 sections form a developer-side, first-sale disclosure chain (notice of intent to sell, a state Real Estate Commission inspection, escrow of deposits) that never reaches a board at all. It says nothing about reserves, nothing about board meetings, nothing about fidelity insurance. The one real, standing duty we could find for an association after formation is this one, in the statute's own words:

"No management or recreation facility contract may be entered into by a developer for a period of longer than two years. All subsequent management or recreation facility contracts shall be made by council of co-owners." — S.D.C.L. § 43-15A-24

That's it. A South Dakota condominium exists under this Act only once someone has voluntarily recorded a master deed — there's no unit-count threshold, no separate HOA law waiting behind it, and no reserve, meeting, or insurance mandate for the fabricated citation to have been describing.

The Wyoming law that doesn't exist

Wyoming has the same problem, worse. Search around and you'll find a "Wyoming Planned Community Ownership Act," cited at two different section numbers: "Wyo. Stat. § 34.1-3-101" and "§ 36-9-201." We checked both directly against Wyoming's own statute text. § 34.1-3-101 sits in Title 34.1 — Wyoming's Uniform Commercial Code. § 36-9-201 sits in Title 36 — the unrelated State Lands Homestead Opportunity Program. Neither has anything to do with homeowners associations, and Wyoming has no planned-community act under any name.

What actually governs a Wyoming condominium is the real Condominium Ownership Act — four sections, Wyo. Stat. §§ 34-20-101 through 34-20-104. It may be the shortest condominium law we've found in any state: it never names a board or a manager, never sets a meeting requirement, and says nothing about insurance or reserves. Every "shall" in it turns out to run to whoever creates the condominium at formation, not to an ongoing board. The one real, quotable, standing duty we could find for a Wyoming association comes from a different law entirely — the Wyoming Nonprofit Corporation Act's member-inspection right, and only for an association that has chosen to incorporate:

"Subject to subsection (e) of this section and W.S. 17-19-1603(c), a member is entitled to inspect and copy, at a reasonable time and location specified by the corporation, any of the records of the corporation described in W.S. 17-19-1601(e) if the member gives the corporation written notice or a written demand at least five (5) business days before the date on which the member wishes to inspect and copy." — Wyo. Stat. § 17-19-1602(a)

We'd rather say a state's law is thin, plainly, than invent detail the legislature never wrote.

How the same wrong citation ends up everywhere

These aren't typos on one obscure page. The same "Planned Community Act" framing for South Dakota, and the same "Planned Community Ownership Act" framing for Wyoming, show up across multiple HOA content sites that run near-identical 50-state templates — the same structure, the same section headers, state after state, with the citation swapped in. We found the South Dakota fabrication word-for-word on more than one national site, and the Wyoming one repeated elsewhere; in these two states, nobody appears to have checked the citation against the text. (We kept the receipts, and we’re happy to share them with anyone who wants to verify.) When we ran a search of our own on these exact questions this month, an AI-generated search summary repeated the fabricated Wyoming citation back to us as settled fact. We're not claiming every AI answer does this every time — only that we watched it happen, on this exact question, in August 2026.

That's the real risk of a wrong statute citation once it's published: it doesn't stay one site's mistake. It gets copied, then summarized, then treated as established fact by systems with no way to tell a real citation from a plausible-sounding one.

How we checked all 50 states

The method is plain, and it's the same one we'd want someone checking our own work to use: for every state, go to that state's own official legislature website, fetch the actual statute text, and quote it — not a summary of it, the sentence itself. Where a state's law is silent on something (South Dakota's silence on reserves, Wyoming's silence on meetings), say so plainly instead of padding the page with a generic best-practices paragraph a reader can't check against anything. Every claim on our state pages sits beside the statute sentence it comes from, so a reader — or their own attorney — can check it directly against the source, rather than take our word for it.

We verified all 50 states against their own published statute text this way. We're not claiming to be the only accurate source online, and we won't be the last word on any of these laws — legislatures amend statutes, and we'd rather a reader catch a change we missed than trust a page that never says when it was last checked. Every state page on GnomeOwner names the date we last checked it against the primary source. If you find something wrong, tell us at support@gnomeowner.com — we'll fix it and say so.

See the full correction

Every state's compliance requirements, with the statute quoted directly, are at gnomeowner.com/states — including the South Dakota and Wyoming pages behind this post. It's free to look up your own state, whether or not you ever use the rest of the product.