Two Virginia boards, two credentials, and a buyer holding one of them.

Two credentials, issued by two boards inside DPOR

Managing a condominium, cooperative or homeowners association is its own licensed profession under Va. Code § 54.1-2346, and the license is issued by the Common Interest Community Board. Renting or offering real estate for rent for others, for compensation, is brokerage under Va. Code § 54.1-2100, so the rental doors of a property management company run on a Virginia Real Estate Board broker license that the buyer holds or employs. Both boards sit inside the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation, which is why owners read the two as one requirement. The carve-out that would collapse them is narrower than its reputation. Section 54.1-2347 saves a licensed real estate broker only for "selling, leasing, renting, or managing lots within a common interest community," which is the lot, not the association that governs it.

One entity may hold both, and § 54.1-2349(B)(2) contemplates exactly that, assigning enforcement to the Real Estate Board where a firm carries both credentials. What stops most buyers is what the second credential costs to get. Section 54.1-2349(A)(2) requires the Board's licensing criteria to include designation as an Accredited Association Management Company by the Community Associations Institute, or a Board-approved equivalent. That accreditation is held by the firm, and it is not a credential an acquirer assembles between signing and closing.

The employee certification is the part diligence most often overstates. Section 54.1-2346(C) makes it a condition of issuing or renewing a common interest community manager's license that employees with principal responsibility for management services, or supervisory responsibility over them, hold a certificate from the Board. The same subsection gives them two years from hire to obtain one and lets an uncertified employee work in the meantime under the direct supervision of a certified employee, and § 54.1-2347 exempts employees of a licensed manager acting within the scope of their employment. The qualifying credentials sit at § 54.1-2349(A)(3): the Certified Manager of Community Associations designation, the Association Management Specialist or Professional Community Association Manager designations from the Community Associations Institute, or a Board-approved training program with a certifying examination. The duty runs to the firm's license rather than to any individual, so what the buying entity needs on the closing date is a certified employee in a supervisory seat, because that is what carries uncertified staff while the two-year clock runs on each of them.

So the credential a buyer walks in holding decides which half of the company it can lawfully operate. A Virginia broker license takes the rental doors and not the association contracts. A common interest community manager license does the reverse. Neither gap closes with a transition services agreement or an indemnity, because what is missing is a credential issued by a board that did not issue the one the buyer already has.

Your leasing staff are exempt only because of one licensed person

Virginia's exemptions from real estate licensure sit at § 54.1-2103, and the ones an owner hears about first were drafted for people who are not in this business. An owner or lessor dealing in its own property in the regular course of business is outside the license. A management corporation is outside it only where the officers, directors and members of the ownership corporation and the management corporation are the same, the property is rental housing, and the management corporation manages no other property for other persons. Read those conditions together and the exemption describes a family managing its own buildings through a second entity. Nothing in the section reaches a company managing for third-party owners, which is the whole of what is being sold.

The exemption that actually appears in diligence is subsection C, covering an employee of a licensed real estate broker who has contracted with the owner to manage the property. It gets called an on-site manager exemption, which narrows it in a way the text does not, since the on-premises condition attaches only to showing units. The employee may exhibit residential units on the premises, give prospective tenants factual information about the rental, accept rental applications, accept and sign broker-approved rental agreements and required state, federal and fair housing disclosures, and accept security deposits and rent. Those payments are payable to the owner or the broker, and the employee may not negotiate any of the amounts, or any rental agreement at all.

Every item on that list is conditioned on the broker. In an owner-operated Virginia management company the principal broker is usually the owner, so when the owner's license leaves the entity at closing, the leasing staff whose activity subsection C covered are working under nobody, and the doors are being managed by a firm with no licensed broker in it. The two fixes are ordinary: a licensed broker placed into the firm before closing, or the seller's broker retained through a defined transition. Both are terms in the purchase agreement, and the second one changes what the seller has agreed to stay for.

The same title that catches the operating company stops short of the sale of it. Section 54.1-2100 sets out the acts that make a person a broker: selling, buying or negotiating the purchase, sale or exchange of real estate, including condominium units, cooperative interests and time-shares; leasing or renting real estate for others; and dealing in real estate contracts on two or more occasions in any twelve-month period. That list is specific enough to count occasions and it still names no going concern, so no Real Estate Board credential sits over the sale of a Virginia management company, and Wraith Brokerage represents Virginia sellers itself.

Four ways to be low-wage in Virginia, and one carve-out

Section 40.1-28.7:8 makes it unlawful to enter into, enforce, or threaten to enforce a covenant not to compete with a low-wage employee, and it carries a civil penalty of $10,000 per violation, a private right of action running two years, and a mandatory workplace posting. Low-wage is a defined term with four prongs, and only the first of them is a dollar figure.

For 2026 the benchmark is the Commonwealth's average weekly wage, $1,507.01, roughly $78,364 annualized. It is calculated by the Virginia Department of Workforce Development and Advancement under Va. Code § 65.2-500(B) and published in the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry's annual notice, and the test is the employee's own average weekly earnings rather than a salary line on an offer letter. Since July 1, 2025 the definition also reaches any employee entitled to overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act, whatever they earn. It reaches interns, students, apprentices and trainees, paid or unpaid. And it reaches an independent contractor compensated at an hourly rate below the median hourly wage for the Commonwealth.

Run a Virginia property management payroll against the overtime prong and most of it lands inside. Leasing agents, maintenance technicians, bookkeepers and most assistant managers are non-exempt, so their covenants are void regardless of what they are paid. Turn and maintenance crews papered as 1099 contractors are caught by the contractor prong where their rate sits below the state median, and the label on the relationship does not move them out of it. What survives is the carve-out for employees paid in whole or predominant part from commissions, incentives or bonuses, which in most management companies means a handful of commissioned leasing producers and nobody else.

The usual fallback is thinner than counsel assumes. Subsection H(1) preserves nondisclosure agreements, including trade secret and confidential information protection, and says nothing at all about non-solicitation; the statute's express non-solicitation preservation, at subsection I(2), reaches health care professionals only. Customer non-solicitation survives in the shape the statutory definition allows, which bars an employee from initiating contact with or soliciting a client and does not bar accepting business the client brings unprompted. Covenants over co-workers are less secure still. On January 27, 2026 the Court of Appeals of Virginia held in Sentry Force Security, LLC v. Barrera that an employee non-solicitation covenant is itself a covenant not to compete under the statute and unenforceable against a low-wage employee, and that decision is under review by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

A buyer underwriting Virginia retention on its national paper is relying on covenants most of its new staff cannot be bound by, and the same section makes threatening to enforce one a violation in its own right. The retention case in Virginia gets built on pay, tenure and the work, because the paper is not available.