Reminder – What to do in advance of making external home improvements

Posted on: April 29th, 2022

All of the residents of Encinitas Ranch benefit from owners who make improvements to their homes. The community strongly endorses and promotes architectural and landscaping improvements. Over the past four years numerous changes have been made to the Architectural Standards to streamline the process for implementing such improvements and to reduce the time and costs.

We all succeed or fail as an entire community based on our ability to follow the adopted Architectural Standards. It is incumbent on all of us to follow these standards and processes and we legally agreed to this when we bought our homes. It is unfair to all other owners for someone to ignore or circumvent these architectural standards. It can be harmful to property values and to the overall appeal of Encinitas Ranch to visitors and to prospective buyers.

Since 2018 the list of improvements requiring no application has been expanded and only major architectural improvements, e.g. home remodels, entire front yard landscaping, need to be reviewed by our consulting architect. Nearly all applications are being reviewed by the Architectural Committee. The vast majority of applications only require a nominal $75 processing fee and most applications are being approved within two to three weeks (assuming the application is complete).

The Architectural Committee conducts regular inspections of all homes in Encinitas Ranch to help ensure that everyone is following the Architectural Standards. They track every home and all external improvements in great detail. If an owner is found to have made an improvement that required an application and they did not submit one then they will be required to follow the process and, they could be forced to remediate or remove the changes made. 

In the past several months the Architectural Committee has seen an increase in these types of situations and are working with each of these owners to ensure compliance.

Please do your part by understanding and following the Architectural Standards that the community most recently updated in 2018. Here is a link to those standards on our website:

http://encinitasranch.org/design/

This not only helps you but it also helps all 500 homeowners in Encinitas Ranch.