Florida licenses 24,330 association managers and Virginia certificates 283. That gap is a drafting difference between two statutes.
Florida, Virginia, Connecticut and Nevada each license community association management and publish a register this site can read. Put their numbers side by side and three comparisons present themselves. Two of them are invalid, and the invalid ones are the quotable ones.
The short version. Virginia's CIC Manager licence is held by firms. Individuals hold a separate certificate. Florida licenses every individual manager directly and its firms hold a second licence on top.
So "Florida has 86 times more licensed managers" divides a count of people by a count of companies. It is arithmetically correct and describes nothing.
| Comparison | Florida | Virginia | Connecticut | Nevada | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individually licensed people | 24,33024,074 active | 283certificate | 342active, of 1,004 on the register | 762active only | invaliddifferent credentials: Florida, Connecticut and Nevada license the person, Virginia issues a certificate alongside a firm licence, and even the three differ in thresholds and in whether inactive licences are published |
| Licensed management firms | 2,066 | 148 | 1active, of 441 business records | not on this list | valid, Florida to Virginiaboth mean a business licensed to manage associations. 14.0 to one. Connecticut has no comparable active count. |
| Registered associations | not published | 7,261 | not on this list | not on this list | impossibleFlorida does not register associations, so there is no Florida number to compare |
Florida licenses the person. Anyone managing an association of more than ten units, or with a budget over $100,000, holds an individual CAM licence. Since 1 January 2009 the firm employing them holds a separate licence as well. Two registers, both of people-and-companies doing the work.
Connecticut licenses the person. Chapter 400b defines a community association manager as a natural person, Public Act 19-177 is the act that redefined the term, and a business needs a principal who holds a registration. The register still holds 1,004 individual and 441 business CAM records, but 342 of the people are active against 1 of the businesses. Of the inactive business records, 111 carry the reason “pursuant to Public Act 19-177” and 308 are marked expired more than three years. The statute and the register agree on the direction; the register's reason field does not say more than that.
Nevada licenses the person and publishes only those currently active: 762 managers, 343 supervisory and 113 provisional, working for 245 distinct employers. 268 of them (35%) were first issued in 2025 or 2026, though an active-only list overstates recent cohorts, because the people who left are not on it.
Virginia licenses the business. Its CIC Manager credential is held by companies, and reading the register makes that unmistakable: Great Eastern Resort Management, Trimark Corporation, Thalhimer. Individuals appear separately as certificate holders, a smaller and differently-scoped population.
⭐ Neither regime is better and that is not the point. The point is that a register is a record of what a legislature decided to count. Two states can regulate the same work and produce populations that differ by two orders of magnitude without the work differing at all.
7,261 community associations are registered with the Virginia Common Interest Community Board. Florida registers none of them.
This is the demand side of the same industry, and it exists in one state's public record and not the other's. Nobody publishes a national list of community associations; the widely cited national counts are estimates, not enumerations. ⚠️ Which also means the Virginia figure is not a sample of anything. It is the whole of one state and tells you nothing about the other forty-nine.
Seven states are on the map. Four registers are read here. The other three rows are labelled by what was actually read, which is less.
| State | What it licenses | Bulk file | How well known |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | the person, and the firm | weekly CSV | read in full |
| Virginia | the firm; individuals hold a separate certificate | regulant lists | read in full |
| Connecticut | the natural person; older business records remain, nearly all inactive | open data API, daily | counted, aggregate |
| Nevada | the person; active licences only are published | monthly workbook | counted, aggregate |
| Illinois | the person and the firm | none found; one-record lookup | regulator page reada records request would be the next step |
| Georgia | reported to license the manager under the real estate commission | paid CSV orders exist; whether they include this class is unknown | secondary source onlythe commission's order page does not mention the class |
| Alaska | reported to fold the work into real estate licences | unknown | secondary source onlythe state site refused automated reads |
California is left off on purpose. Its code protects a private title, “certified common interest development manager”, rather than creating a state licence, according to secondary sources; the statute page refused automated reads here, so that row is not asserted either way. A register that is not on this map is unread, not absent.
Searchable, with licence number, city and licence dates, from the state extract rather than a directory that charges a firm to appear.
2,066 firms FindingAfter the September 2026 renewal date13,514 licences were due on 30 September 2026. In the 2026-10-29 extract, 5,005 still carried that date.
5,005 licences FindingNew licences have roughly doubled since 2019The profession managing Florida associations is being re-staffed, and the register shows it a year at a time.
2,179 in 2025 ComparisonHOA software pricing, read from each vendorTwo of five publish a rate card, and the band edges do not line up, so the cheapest product changes with association size.
$45 to $275Florida figures are computed from the DBPR bulk extract lic38cam.csv, refreshed weekly. Virginia figures come from the DPOR Common Interest Community regulant lists 0501, 0510 and 0550, refreshed every five business days. Both retrieved 2026-10-29. Connecticut figures come from the Department of Consumer Protection dataset ngch-56tr on data.ct.gov (public domain), credential type CAM, and Nevada figures from the Real Estate Division's active CAM list, both read 2026-10-29. For those two states only aggregates are published, never a name or an address. The credential definitions were confirmed by reading the register rows themselves rather than the column headings, which is how the firm-versus-individual difference surfaced.
We have not divided these figures by state population, and that is deliberate. A per-capita version would imply the comparison becomes valid once it is adjusted. It does not. The objects being counted are different, and no denominator repairs a mismatch of kind. Offering the adjusted number would undo this page's argument while appearing to strengthen it.
The coverage is four registers. Florida and Virginia are read in full and Connecticut and Nevada as aggregates. Only a handful of states license this profession at all, and the others have not been read. The data is downloadable here.
Dwellory. "Counting licensed managers across states measures the law, not the market." Computed from the Florida DBPR weekly licensure extracts, the Virginia DPOR Common Interest Community regulant lists, the Connecticut DCP eLicensing dataset and the Nevada NRED active CAM list, retrieved 2026-10-29. https://dwellory.org/comparing-manager-licences-across-states
Quote the retrieval date with any figure. The source refreshes weekly and these counts move with it.
The same method, applied to registers in other professions. FreightProbe, the ELD and carrier-compliance register, read the same way. GrantProbe, public grant programmes, enumerated from the awarding bodies.