Hate your HOA rules? There may be a way around them.

When a Cape Cod homeowners association hired attorney Richard D. Vetstein of Vetstein Law Group in Framingham to review their homeowner’s association covenants, he made a shocking find.

A little-noticed 2017 Massachusetts Appeals Court ruling meant the restrictions in that association’s covenant, which dated to 1977, had expired unnoticed more than a decade ago. Vetstein said most of the real estate attorneys he has shared this discovery with also have been shocked.

Condominiums are exempt from this law; it applies only to homes in subdivisions governed by a homeowner’s association.

Homeowners in subdivisions with HOAs are still required to pay dues for the services their association provides, such as trash collection, but controls on owner behavior — ones that prevent you from leaving your boat in the driveway, requiring your fence to be a certain height, breed restrictions on your pets, and limits on how long you can keep up your holiday decorations or political signs — have an expiration date.

“If an HOA doesn’t have an extension provision in their covenant, the restrictions expire after 30 years,” Vetstein said. “If they do have an extension provision, they have to exercise it within the 30 years. And the longest they can extend it is 20 years, as long as there is a 20-year extension provision in the original covenant.”

HOAs are often run by untrained volunteer owners who aren’t well-versed in legal rulings like this. The Community Association Institute estimates there are more than 11,500 community associations (including HOAs and condominium groups) in Massachusetts. It does not track HOAs separately.

“One of the issues that is coming up that’s triggering a review of these covenants is short-term rentals,” Vetstein said. “Homeowner’s associations want to create new rules banning short-term rentals, and when they find out their covenant is expired and they can’t create a new one, they’re going to be upset.”

Neil D. Golden is an attorney with Gilmartin Magence LLP and cochair of the Real Estate Bar Association’s Standards and Forms Committee. He said HOA restrictions aren’t always well intended.

“Historically, restrictions have often been a bad thing,” Golden said. “Restrictions were used to keep all Blacks, Jews, Irish from living where they wanted to. That’s illegal now, but restrictions were often used for bad purposes.”

Golden said once the restrictions turn 30, they expire because all three branches of state government want them to expire.

“The state’s attitude to those restrictions, and they modified all the restriction laws in 1961, is they don’t like restrictions,” he said. “Neither does the Legislature or the courts. That’s the reason they expire after 30 years. Also, most people don’t want to be restricted in how they use their own homes.”

Bill DeBear, a lawyer affiliated with Moriarty, Bielan & Malloy LLC, said HOAs should have an attorney review their covenants to determine whether their restrictions are still enforceable and if they can be extended past the 30-year expiration date.

The good news: None of the lawyers interviewed for this story or the loan originator who spoke to us on background voiced concern that the expired restrictions would affect whether a prospective buyer could get a mortgage on properties within the HOA.

“I’m not sure offhand how expiration of enforceability might affect mortgage decisions, since I’m not sure lenders or their counsel generally are aware of the issues,” DeBears wrote in an email.

“This is definitely something that’s just hiding under the surface,” Vetstein said. “And we’ll be seeing a lot of it, I’m sure.”

Jim Morrison can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @jimmorrison617. Follow Address on X @GlobeHomes.