The condo is fine. The project is what failed
Quick answer: A non-warrantable condo is a unit in a project that fails Fannie Mae's published project standards, so no lender can sell that loan to Fannie Mae. Nothing is wrong with the unit itself. The building failed a test on its budget, reserves, litigation, commercial space, ownership mix or hotel-like operation. In Las Vegas, check hotel character first: a rental desk, daily cleaning or rental pooling. The unit is still financeable. It moves to a portfolio, non-QM or DSCR loan that nobody sells to an agency.
A non-warrantable condo is worth finding out about before you write the offer, not after the appraisal. Nevada law is unusually generous here. Under NRS 116.4109 the seller has to hand you a resale package. It carries the budget, the reserve summary and the litigation statement. Since July 1, 2026 it also carries proof of the association's insurance. Those four documents answer most of what a lender's project reviewer will ask. You then get five calendar days to walk. Most buyers spend that window reading nothing.
Key takeaways
- A non-warrantable condo is a statement about the project, not about you. Perfect credit and a large down payment cannot fix a building that fails the standards.
- Hotel character is the Las Vegas trap. Fannie Mae lists registration services, daily rentals, daily cleaning, central key systems and mandatory rental pooling as disqualifying. A resort-branded tower with a rental desk fails on the operation, not on the finish.
- Four numbers do a lot of the work. Commercial space above 35 percent. One entity above 20 percent of a project of 21 or more units. More than 15 percent of units 60 days past due. A replacement reserve allocation under 10 percent of assessment income.
- Unfunded repairs above 10,000 dollars per unit inside 12 months make a project ineligible. On a 240-unit tower that line sits at 2,400,000 dollars of work.
- The Nevada resale package is evidence the seller pays for. NRS 116.4109 furnishes it at the unit owner's expense and caps the certificate fee at 185 dollars. The association gets 10 calendar days. You can cancel until midnight of the fifth calendar day after you receive it.
What is a non-warrantable condo?
A warrantable condo is one where the lender can warrant to Fannie Mae that the project meets Fannie Mae's standards. Make that warranty and the loan sells. Conversely, break it and the loan comes back. For that reason lenders check the project before they check you. A project that fails the check turns every unit inside it non-warrantable on the same afternoon.
Therefore the phrase non-warrantable condo describes the building, not the borrower. Your credit score is irrelevant to it. Likewise your down payment. Two identical units in two identical towers can get two different answers. One association funds its reserves properly and the other does not.
Where the non-warrantable condo rules are actually written
Fannie Mae publishes them in the Selling Guide. In particular, two topics matter. B4-2.1-03 lists the ineligible project characteristics, and B4-2.2-01 sets out the Full Review process. Both carry an August 5, 2026 effective date under Announcement SEL-2026-07. Freddie Mac publishes its own standards too. Fannie Mae's guide even cross-references them. A project that Freddie Mac rules ineligible for condo hotel or short-term rental activity is ineligible for Fannie Mae as well.
Furthermore, there is a status nobody talks about. Fannie Mae runs a system called Condo Project Manager. Its guide says plainly that loans in projects marked Unavailable there cannot be purchased. So a status flag can block a project before anyone reads a single budget line.
Licensing, stated plainly. Valley West Mortgage holds NMLS #65506 and is licensed in Nevada. Our state-by-state licensing disclosure lists every licence by name. This page describes program terms generally. Portfolio and non-QM programs are not agency programs, and each lender publishes its own rules.
Which Las Vegas condos run into this?
Las Vegas built a condo market next to a hospitality market, and the two blur together. That overlap is where a non-warrantable condo file usually comes from here. For example, a tower near the Strip may share a lobby with a hotel operation. It may carry a rental desk, offer daily housekeeping and sit under a resort brand. Every one of those features appears on Fannie Mae's disqualifying list. None of them says anything about whether the concrete is sound.
Meanwhile mixed-use is the second pressure. A podium full of restaurants and retail looks like an amenity to a buyer. To an underwriter it looks like commercial square footage. Fannie Mae caps non-residential space at 35 percent, so a tower can be beautifully run and still fail on a floor plan.
The third reason is quieter and more common
Meanwhile, older valley associations underfund reserves. Nevada forces the arithmetic into the open. NRS 116.31152 requires a reserve study at least once every 5 years and an annual review of it. The study must identify every major component with a remaining useful life under 30 years. A board that has read that study and still funds reserves thinly has produced the evidence of its own problem. Fannie Mae wants the annual replacement reserve allocation to be at least 10 percent of the association's annual budgeted assessment income, and it divides one by the other to check. However, an acceptable reserve study may stand in for that calculation, so a thin-looking line is not automatically a failure.
Which project tests does Fannie Mae actually run?
Similarly, the thresholds below come from the two live Selling Guide topics rather than from memory. Most rows are a hard line, and a project that crosses one is ineligible however well it does on the others. Two carry a documented way out, and the table says so.
| Test | The published line | A worked example | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial space | May not exceed 35 percent | 120,000 sq ft of retail in a 300,000 sq ft tower is 40 percent | Fails |
| Single-entity ownership | 21 or more units: 20 percent. 11 to 20 units: 2 units. 5 to 10 units that are part of a master association: 2 units | 68 of 300 units is 22.67 percent, against a cap of 60 units | Fails |
| Assessment delinquency | No more than 15 percent of units 60 days or more past due | 19 of 120 units is 15.83 percent, against a cap of 18 units | Fails |
| Replacement reserves | Annual replacement reserve allocation at least 10 percent of annual budgeted assessment income | 150,000 dollars against 2,400,000 dollars of assessment income is 6.25 percent, against a floor of 240,000 dollars | Fails, unless an acceptable reserve study stands in |
| Unfunded critical repairs | Above 10,000 dollars per unit inside 12 months | 3,100,000 dollars of work on 240 units is 12,916.67 dollars per unit | Fails |
| Litigation | HOA named in pending litigation on safety, structural soundness, habitability or functional use | A construction defect suit over balcony framing | Fails, but seven minor-matter exceptions exist |
| Evacuation order | Partial or total evacuation for an unsafe condition | A closed parking structure under a municipal order | Fails until remediated |
Reading the non-warrantable condo table
Notice how few of these are about the building's condition. Most of them are about paperwork, money and who owns what. Therefore a project can look immaculate on a tour and still fail on a spreadsheet.
The repair test surprises most non-warrantable condo buyers
The project. A 240-unit Las Vegas high-rise. The engineer's report identifies 3,100,000 dollars of work due within the next 12 months. The association has not funded it. No special assessment covers it either.
The line. Fannie Mae's threshold is 10,000 dollars per unit. Multiply 240 by 10,000. The project may carry up to 2,400,000 dollars of unfunded work inside that window.
The arithmetic. Divide 3,100,000 by 240. That is 12,916.67 dollars per unit, or 2,916.67 dollars per unit over the line.
The outcome. The project is ineligible until the work is actually remediated. Note the wording, because it matters. The figure excludes repairs a unit owner makes and repairs funded through a special assessment. That exclusion changes the arithmetic, not the verdict. Fannie Mae says separately that where a special assessment is tied to a critical repair and the issue is not remediated, the project stays ineligible. A board vote to raise the money is not the cure. Finishing the work is.
In other words, that distinction is the useful one. Indeed several of these tests are curable. The reserve test moves when a board adopts a stronger funding plan, and delinquency moves when the association collects. A critical repair is the exception, because there a vote to raise the money is not the cure. A buyer who knows which test failed can therefore ask the board one specific question, instead of walking away from the whole building.
When does Fannie Mae treat a condo as a hotel?
Above all, this test decides most Strip-adjacent towers, and it is broader than people expect. A project is ineligible if any one of four things is true. The association holds a licence as a hotel, motel, resort or hospitality entity. The project documents restrict an owner's ability to occupy the unit during any part of the year. The documents require owners to make the unit available for rental pooling. Or the documents require owners to share rental profits with the association, a management company, a resort or a hotel rental company.
Then comes a second list, which in contrast catches buildings that pass the first one. A project also fails if it is primarily transient in nature. Registration services, daily or short-term rentals, daily cleaning, central telephone service and central key systems each do it. So does a hotel conversion that still reads like a hotel. A legal or common name containing hotel, motel or resort does it too, unless that use is purely historical. Finally, a hotel rating from a travel agency, a booking site or a search engine is enough on its own.
Non-warrantable condo red flags are not the same as failures
Fannie Mae keeps a separate list of what it calls common red flags. These trigger extra due diligence rather than an automatic denial. Units under 400 square feet. No full-sized kitchen appliances. Advertisements for daily or short-term rates. Franchise agreements. Location in a resort area. Interior doors that adjoin different units. And a big one for the valley: 75 percent or more of the units held as investment or second homes. Investors should also read how a Las Vegas short-term rental gets underwritten on its own income, because a condotel unit sits in both conversations at once.
Not every lawsuit makes a non-warrantable condo
The litigation row deserves a footnote. Where a lender determines that pending litigation involves minor matters with no impact on the safety, structural soundness, habitability or functional use of the project, Fannie Mae lists seven kinds of matter that leave the project eligible. Neighbour disputes and other non-monetary actions qualify. So does a matter the insurance carrier has agreed to defend and that the association's insurance covers. So does one where the reasonably anticipated damages and legal expenses are not expected to exceed 10 percent of the project's funded reserves. Personal injury and construction defect claims are held to tighter tests. Therefore the right question is not whether the association is in court, but what the court case is about.
The sentence worth remembering. A condo hotel is not a lesser condo. In the eyes of the agencies it is a different asset class, and no amount of down payment converts it back.
How do you find out before you are committed?
Fortunately Nevada gives you a statutory answer, and it is the strongest tool a Las Vegas condo buyer has. NRS 116.4109 requires the seller to furnish a resale package, at the seller's own expense. Since July 1, 2026 that package must include proof of the insurance policies the association carries under NRS 116.3113. The 2025 Legislature added that paragraph. The rest of the contents were already there.
Similarly, read against Fannie Mae's tests, the package is close to a warrantability file that somebody else pays for.
| Resale package item | NRS 116.4109 paragraph | The project test it speaks to |
|---|---|---|
| Current operating budget and year-to-date financial statement | 1(c) | The 10 percent replacement reserve funding test |
| Summary of the reserve study required by NRS 116.31152 | 1(c) | Deferred maintenance and critical repairs |
| Statement of unsatisfied judgments and pending legal actions | 1(d) | The litigation test |
| Proof of the association's insurance, new since July 1, 2026 | 1(g) | Master property, liability and fidelity coverage |
| Assessment statement and any unpaid obligation on the unit | 1(b) | Delinquency, and what you inherit at closing |
| Declaration, bylaws and rules | 1(a) | Rental pooling, occupancy restrictions and hotel character |
| Statement of transfer, transaction and resale fees | 1(e), 1(f) | Your own cash to close |
How long it takes, and what it costs
Making the request. The statute runs through the seller. Once the unit's owner or the owner's agent asks in writing, the association gets 10 calendar days to produce the documents and the certificate.
What it costs the seller, capped by statute. The association may charge the unit's owner a certificate fee, and that fee may not exceed 185 dollars. Where the owner asks for it sooner than 3 business days, the association may add an expedite fee of no more than 100 dollars. Both figures can rise annually with the Consumer Price Index, but by no more than 3 percent a year.
Paper, only where electronic fails. The statute makes electronic delivery the default and attaches no copying charge to it. Where the association cannot manage that, copies are capped at 25 cents a page for the first 10 pages and 10 cents a page after that. On that fallback a 150-page package is (10 x 0.25) plus (140 x 0.10). That is 2.50 plus 14.00, or 16.50 dollars.
The worst case, all in. 185 plus 100 plus 16.50 is 301.50 dollars, and NRS 116.4109 puts every cent of it on the seller. The package is furnished at the expense of the unit's owner, and each fee cap is written as what the association may charge the unit's owner. So the file that tells you whether the building will finance arrives before you spend anything of your own on an appraisal.
The window. You may cancel by written notice until midnight of the fifth calendar day after you receive the package. Cancellation carries no penalty, and your purchase contract has to say so.
The non-warrantable condo clause that protects your wallet
Besides that, one more clause is worth knowing. Under NRS 116.4109(5) you are not liable for an unpaid assessment or fee larger than the amount the association stated in its own certificate. So the document protects your wallet as well as your decision.
Want a Las Vegas condo project read before you write the offer?
Send the project name, the unit address and the resale package if you already have it. You get a plain read on which project test is likely to bite. You also get an answer on whether the association's own documents describe hotel operation, and on which financing route the building supports. Current as of September 1, 2026.
Get your fast quoteDoes FHA approval rescue a non-warrantable condo?
Sometimes, and indeed it is worth checking. That is because FHA runs its own approval list on its own rules. The regulation is 24 CFR 203.43b. FHA's current framework came from the Condominium Project Approval Final Rule, published on August 15, 2019 under docket FR-5715-F-02. It took effect on October 15, 2019.
FHA's structure differs from Fannie Mae's in one important way. The regulation sets ranges that bind HUD, not the project, and lets HUD fix the operative number by notice. HUD must set the commercial-space cap somewhere between 25 and 55 percent. It must set the ceiling on units carrying FHA-insured mortgages between 25 and 75 percent. And it must set the owner-occupancy floor between 30 and 75 percent. Anyone quoting you a single hard percentage is quoting a notice, not the regulation. Check the current one on HUD's own condominium page rather than a blog.
Single-Unit Approval, and its two hard limits
Similarly, FHA allows one unit to win approval inside an unapproved project. The unit cannot sit in a project that is already FHA-approved or under an adverse determination. The project must be complete. The unit cannot be manufactured housing. And the project must hold at least five dwelling units. Concentration is then capped. The regulation lets HUD set the ceiling anywhere from 0 to 20 percent of units in projects of 10 or more. For projects with fewer than 10 units it hard-caps the count at two FHA-insured mortgages, full stop.
However, none of this helps a genuine condo hotel. FHA's own eligibility text requires a project to be primarily residential and not intended for rental for transient or hotel purposes. That is the same door closing from a different direction.
How does a non-warrantable condo get financed?
Namely, by a lender that keeps the loan on its own books, or by one selling it to somebody who is not an agency. That is the whole mechanism. Once nobody warrants anything to Fannie Mae, the project tests above stop disqualifying the file. They become underwriting factors instead.
| Route | What qualifies you | What the project must satisfy | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conventional, warrantable | Income, credit and assets under agency rules | Every Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac project standard | A clean, well-run project |
| FHA, approved project or Single-Unit Approval | FHA borrower rules | 24 CFR 203.43b, at the figures HUD sets by notice inside the regulation's ranges | A project on FHA's list, or one unit inside an unapproved one |
| Portfolio or non-QM | Income and credit under the lender's own rules | The lender's own project review, not an agency warranty | Hotel character, litigation, concentration, mixed use |
| DSCR, business purpose only | The unit's rent measured against its full housing cost | The lender's own project review, plus rentability | An investor buying the unit as a rental |
Why the DSCR route is a different legal animal
A DSCR loan on a non-owner-occupied rental is business-purpose credit. Regulation Z exempts an extension of credit primarily for a business, commercial or agricultural purpose at 12 CFR 1026.3(a)(1). That is why the file looks so different from a primary-residence loan. It is also why the route closes to anyone who plans to live in the unit.
Consequently, the right starting point depends on who you are. If the purchase is genuinely an investment, start with how a DSCR loan qualifies a Las Vegas rental on its rent. If you intend to hold the unit in an entity, vesting a rental in an LLC covers the title question. For a primary residence in a project that simply fails one agency test, begin at what a non-QM loan is and at our non-QM lending page for Las Vegas.
If the project turns out to be perfectly warrantable after all, the agency route is cheaper and you should take it. Our conventional site walks through that side on its Las Vegas condo page, and the local product page is conventional loans in Las Vegas.
What does the non-warrantable route cost you?
Honestly, it varies more than any published table can capture. Nevertheless the drivers are knowable. Pretending otherwise would be the mistake. Lenders price portfolio and non-QM loans against the risk they intend to hold, so the same unit can draw different terms from different desks in the same week. What we can tell you is where the cost comes from, because those drivers are stable.
What moves the price on a non-warrantable condo
First, which test the project failed. A litigation flag on structural safety reads very differently from a project 2 percentage points short on reserve funding. Second, occupancy. A primary residence, a second home and a rental are three different risks. Third, the exit. A lender that intends to keep the loan prices it differently from one packaging it for sale. Fourth, documentation. A file with a current reserve study, a clean insurance certificate and a board that answers questions is simply easier to underwrite.
As a result, the practical move is to fix what you can fix. Order the resale package early. Get the full reserve study rather than the summary. Ask the manager in writing whether the association holds a hospitality licence, and whether the documents require rental pooling. Those three actions cost the seller roughly 300 dollars and cost you about a fortnight. What they buy is a lender looking at documents instead of guessing, and guesswork is expensive.
What should you do before you write the offer?
Above all, work in this order, because each step feeds the next. It comes from the statutes and guides cited on this page, and each step exists because a later step depends on it.
Step 1. Name the project and check its status. Ask your lender to look the project up in Fannie Mae's Condo Project Manager and on FHA's approved list. An Unavailable status in Condo Project Manager settles the agency question immediately.
Step 2. Get the resale package moving, through the seller. The 10 calendar day clock under NRS 116.4109(3) starts when the unit's owner or the owner's agent asks the association in writing, so this is a request you make of the seller rather than of the association. Ask for the full reserve study alongside the statutory summary.
Step 3. Read the declaration for hotel character. Look for mandatory rental pooling, profit sharing with a management company, and any restriction on your own right to occupy the unit. Any one of those ends the agency route.
The four numbers, then the deadline
Step 4. Do the four arithmetic checks. Commercial space against 35 percent. Single-entity ownership against 20 percent. Delinquency against 15 percent. Reserve allocation against 10 percent of assessment income, remembering that a reserve study can substitute for that last one.
Step 5. Price the repair line. Take the unfunded work due inside 12 months, divide by the unit count, and compare the result to 10,000 dollars per unit.
Step 6. Decide inside the five day window. Cancellation under NRS 116.4109(2) runs to midnight of the fifth calendar day after delivery. So book the lender conversation for day two or three, not day five.
In short, buyers who run those six steps rarely get surprised. Buyers who skip to the appraisal often pay for one twice. For the loan-file half of the same fortnight, how preapproval actually works covers what a lender needs from you while the association produces its documents.
Non-warrantable condos: FAQ
Non-warrantable condo basics
What makes a condo non-warrantable?
A condo is non-warrantable when its project fails one of Fannie Mae's published project standards. The lender then cannot warrant the project, so the loan will not sell to Fannie Mae. The common causes are hotel or motel operation and non-residential space above 35 percent. A single entity owning more than 20 percent of a project of 21 or more units does it too. So does having more than 15 percent of units 60 days or more past due on assessments. So does an annual replacement reserve allocation under 10 percent of assessment income, unless an acceptable reserve study stands in for the calculation. Pending litigation about safety or structural soundness qualifies, and so do unfunded critical repairs above 10,000 dollars per unit due within 12 months. The unit itself is not the problem. The project is.
Can I still get a mortgage on a non-warrantable condo in Las Vegas?
Yes, through a lender that keeps the loan or sells it outside the agency channel. Portfolio and non-QM programs run their own project review instead of warranting anything to Fannie Mae. A failed agency test then becomes an underwriting factor rather than an automatic decline. If you are buying the unit as a rental, a DSCR loan qualifies on the property's rent rather than your tax returns. Terms vary by lender and by project. No lender can quote you anything meaningful until somebody has read the project documents.
Condo hotels, the Strip, and the non-warrantable condo line
Is a Las Vegas condotel always non-warrantable?
If it genuinely operates as a hotel, yes. Fannie Mae makes a project ineligible when the association holds a licence as a hotel, motel, resort or hospitality entity. The same applies when the documents restrict an owner's ability to occupy the unit during any part of the year, when they require rental pooling, or when they require owners to share rental profits with the association or a management company. A second list adds transient use, registration services, daily or short-term rentals, daily cleaning and central key systems. It also adds hotel conversions, hotel branding in the name, and even a hotel rating from a booking site. FHA closes the same door from its side. 24 CFR 203.43b requires a project to be primarily residential and not intended for rental for transient or hotel purposes.
Does a project with short-term rentals automatically fail?
Not automatically, and the distinction sits in the documents. Fannie Mae treats mandatory rental pooling and profit sharing as disqualifying. It also disqualifies voluntary rental-pooling agreements that restrict an owner's use through blackout dates or occupancy limits. Advertisements for daily or short-term rates sit on the separate red-flag list, which calls for extra due diligence rather than an automatic denial. So a building where some owners happen to rent short term is a different case from a building whose declaration hands a management company control of the calendar.
Non-warrantable condo rules in Nevada
How do I check a Las Vegas condo's warrantability before I buy?
Use the Nevada resale package. NRS 116.4109 requires the seller to furnish the declaration and bylaws, the current operating budget and year-to-date financial statement, and a summary of the reserve study required by NRS 116.31152. The package also carries a statement of unsatisfied judgments and pending legal actions, the assessment statement, a schedule of fees and, effective July 1, 2026, proof of the association's insurance. The association gets 10 calendar days to produce it after the unit's owner or the owner's agent asks in writing. Statute bills the package to the seller and caps the certificate fee at 185 dollars, with an expedite fee of up to 100 dollars for delivery inside 3 business days. You may then cancel by written notice until midnight of the fifth calendar day after you receive the package.
What changed in Nevada's resale package on July 1, 2026?
One paragraph was added. The 2025 Legislature amended NRS 116.4109, so the resale package must now include proof of the insurance policies an association carries under NRS 116.3113. That matters to a condo buyer. Master insurance is one of the items a lender verifies on a project review, and the buyer now receives it as a matter of statutory right rather than as a favour.
Fixing a non-warrantable condo project
Can a condo project become warrantable again?
Several of the tests are curable. Delinquency falls when the association collects. Reserve funding rises when the board adopts a stronger funding plan. Critical repairs come off the list once the work is remediated, not when it is merely funded. Fannie Mae says a special assessment tied to an unremediated critical repair leaves the project ineligible, so the vote by itself does not help. Litigation ends when it ends. Structural facts like commercial square footage and the ownership mix are much harder to change. Hotel operation written into the declaration is harder still.
Does a bigger down payment make a non-warrantable condo warrantable?
No. Warrantability describes the project. Nothing you do as a borrower changes the project's budget, its reserves, its litigation or its commercial square footage. A larger down payment can improve the terms a portfolio or non-QM lender offers you, because it reduces the risk on an asset that lender intends to hold. It cannot make the loan saleable to Fannie Mae.
Article history
- September 1, 2026. First published. Sources read live for this build were Fannie Mae Selling Guide B4-2.1-03 and B4-2.2-01, both carrying an August 5, 2026 effective date. Also read were 24 CFR 203.43b and 12 CFR 1026.3 at eCFR, HUD's FHA Condominiums page, and NRS 116.4109 and NRS 116.31152 at the Nevada Legislature. Every threshold in the tables came from the served text of those pages. Every worked figure was recomputed by hand.
Same-day corrections
- September 1, 2026, sources refused. The VA's condominium appraisal page at benefits.va.gov returns HTTP 200 while serving a page titled 404 Page Not Found. This build refused it as a source, so no VA condominium rule appears anywhere on this page. The commonly repeated 50 percent owner-occupancy rule also stayed out of the Fannie Mae section, because it does not appear in the live Full Review topic. Owner occupancy appears only where it genuinely lives, in FHA's regulation, and there only as the regulatory range.
What the fact check changed
- September 1, 2026, same-day correction. An adversarial fact-check caught eight errors within the hour. The critical-repair section said a funded special assessment could move a project back across the line; Fannie Mae's own Special Assessments paragraph says the opposite, so the page now says remediation is the cure and a vote is not. The Nevada resale package was billed to the buyer, when NRS 116.4109 furnishes it at the unit owner's expense and bills every capped fee to the seller. The single-entity row dropped the words "that are part of a master association" from the 5 to 10 unit band. The three FHA range sentences read as though a project's own percentage had to sit inside the range, when the range binds the figure HUD sets by notice. The reserve test was measured against the total budget rather than annual budgeted assessment income, and it omitted the reserve study that may stand in for the calculation. The litigation row was called a hard line with no mention of the seven minor-matter exceptions, which now have their own section. Paper copies were described as a buyer's choice when electronic delivery is the statutory default and is free. And step 2 told the buyer to start a clock that only the unit's owner or the owner's agent can start.
Next review
- Next scheduled review: the next Fannie Mae Selling Guide announcement that touches Chapter B4-2. An announcement there moves the thresholds in the first table. A Nevada legislative session moves the second one.
About the reviewer
Find out which route your Las Vegas condo actually qualifies for
One conversation gets you three things. First, a read on which project test the building is likely to fail. Second, whether the declaration describes hotel operation, which separates a fixable problem from a permanent one. Third, the financing routes the project genuinely supports, agency or otherwise.
Start your fast quoteAcross Valley West: Buyers whose project turns out to be perfectly warrantable will want the Las Vegas condo walkthrough on our conventional lending site. Investors sizing a unit as a rental can work through its checklist of what makes a property eligible in the first place. A condo owner also carries a walls-in policy on top of the association's master coverage, and that side sits with Valley West Insurance, our insurance agency.
Keep reading
- Non-QM lending in Las Vegas, start to finish
- What a non-QM loan is, in plain terms
- Conventional loans in Las Vegas
- Qualifying a rental on its own income
- Financing a Las Vegas short-term rental
- Holding the unit in an LLC
- Getting preapproved before you shop
Where the agency thresholds come from
- Fannie Mae Selling Guide B4-2.1-03, Ineligible Projects. Effective August 5, 2026 under Announcement SEL-2026-07. Source for the hotel and motel criteria, the 35 percent commercial space cap and the single-entity ownership limits. Also the litigation rule, the critical repair definition including the 10,000 dollar per unit test, the evacuation-order rule and the Condo Project Manager Unavailable status.
- Fannie Mae Selling Guide B4-2.2-01, Full Review Process. Effective August 5, 2026. Source for the 15 percent limit on units 60 days or more past due, on common expense assessments and on each special assessment. Also for the 10 percent replacement reserve test, its denominator of annual budgeted assessment income, the four income types excluded from it, and the reserve study that may be used in its place.
The FHA regulation, and HUD's own page
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, 24 CFR 203.43b. Eligibility of mortgages on single-family condominium units, as published at 84 FR 41875 on August 15, 2019. Source for the primarily-residential and transient-use requirement, and for the ranges inside which HUD must set each figure by notice: 25 to 55 percent for the commercial space cap, 25 to 75 percent for the FHA concentration ceiling and 30 to 75 percent for the owner-occupancy floor. Also for the Single-Unit Approval conditions and its concentration caps.
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, FHA Condominiums. Source for the Condominium Project Approval Final Rule under docket FR-5715-F-02, published August 15, 2019. Also for the addition of Handbook 4000.1 sections II.A.8.p and II.C, and the October 15, 2019 effective date.
Nevada statutes cited above
- Nevada Revised Statutes 116.4109, resales of units, effective July 1, 2026. Source for the resale package contents at subsection 1, including the new paragraph (g) proof of insurance. Also for the five calendar day cancellation right at subsection 2, the 10 calendar day production deadline at subsection 3, and, at subsection 4, the 185 dollar certificate cap, the 100 dollar expedite cap, the electronic-delivery default and the per-page copying limits that apply only when electronic delivery is not possible.
- Nevada Revised Statutes 116.31152, study of reserves. Source for the reserve study at least once every 5 years, the annual review and funding-plan adjustment, and the permit requirement for the person conducting the study. Also for the identification of components with a remaining useful life under 30 years, and the 45 day filing of the summary with the Division.
The federal rule behind the DSCR route
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, 12 CFR 1026.3, exempt transactions. Source for the business-purpose exemption at paragraph (a)(1). It is what puts a non-owner-occupied rental loan outside the consumer mortgage rules.
Last updated: September 1, 2026. Every threshold and statutory figure was verified against the primary sources listed above on that date.
This article is for general information and is not legal, tax or investment advice. Valley West Mortgage is an independent mortgage lender, NMLS #65506, licensed in Nevada. Equal Housing Opportunity. Valley West Mortgage is not affiliated with, or acting on behalf of or at the direction of, HUD, the FHA, the VA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or any other government agency or government sponsored enterprise. Agency and HUD material is cited here only as published public guidance. Warrantability is determined project by project by the lender making the warranty, and a project's status can change. DSCR financing is business-purpose credit for non-owner-occupied investment property, and neither the borrower nor a family member may occupy the property. All figures on this page are illustrative. They are not an offer of credit, a rate quote, a preapproval or a commitment to lend, and program terms vary by lender and by project.
