Mechanism needed if more owners want to rent than permitted by CC&R's

I'm the president of the HOA of a small (9 unit) condo complex. We have three owners who have been renting their units for several years. A fourth owner recently stuck a for rent sign outside the building, and immediately the HOA took the required steps to amend our CC&R's to limit the number of renters to three (33%) at any one time, much to the chagrine of the owner who wanted to be the fourth owner to rent out his unit.

However, due to the initial urgency of merely creating a limit, we didn't address and now need to amend our CC&R's again to deal with the situation where a non-renting owner wants to rent out his or her unit when one of the existing renters moves out. There is clearly a divide on this issue. The three renting owners want language that gives them up to 3 months to rent out their unit to a new tenant before a non-renting owner gets a chance to rent their unit. Their argument is that they purchased their unit in the first place to rent it out and never had the intention of personally living in the building, so to go to the back of a waiting list would force them to sell. My view as a non-renting owner who may want to rent out my unit in the future is that we are all subject to this limitation on our rights that didn't exist when we bought our units. Further, I think that when a renter moves out, it should basically be whoever rents out their unit first gets one of the three slots or even that the non-renting owner who wants to rent should get an exclusive opportunity of some length to rent their unit first, for a variety of reasons but namely because they've been waiting their turn to rent.

I'm trying to amicably resolve this, but at the end of the day I think it's going to be the six non-renting owners overruling the three renting owners on two very different proposed sets of rules (vs. everyone agreeing on something palatable to everyone).

Does anyone have any suggestion or solutions to dealing with this problem? We also already agreed in principal to amend our CC&R's to require an owner to live in their unit for one year before they can rent in order to hopefully eliminate any more flippers or income investors from buying into our building, which is something that everyone (renting owners and non-renting owners) agreed upon.

This is a controversial subject and have bad news for you. Unless the HOA actually OWNS ALL the Units the HOA can NOT place restrictions on Renting. Renting property is up to the MORTGAGE company/owner. It's unenforceable even if it's in the HOA rules.

I understand completely the whole Renters destroy home values and let's limit it argument. It would be great if indeed a HOA could enforce such restrictions. The issue is that it is INDIVIDUALS that OWN the houses. This means as an individual you have the right to do with your property as you wish. A HOA deals with the GROUP of homeowners COLLECTIVE rights. Renting issue cross this line.

What you can do instead is hold the owner's feet to the rules. If their renter violates rules or does damage the HOA has every right to go to the owner to hold their feet to the fire. This means if the Renter damages the property the HOA can LIEN the owner for any money it spends to make the repairs. An owner knowing that if they rent that they will be on the hook for repairs may take more of an interest in their rental property.

I find it best to be pro-active against lawsuits. A good lawyer could easily rip through a "No rent" rule in HOA if an owner wants to rent their property out. It's just best NOT to have it at all and work within the existing laws/rules against the owners that can be enforced. I would suggest instead exploring if your RULE allow for FINES for the violations you want to enforce instead of adding restrictions. If you have Fines listed in your documentation it's more enforceable than if you don't.