Commonwise helps HOA and condo boards understand what rules govern their community — combining bylaws, CC&Rs, and applicable laws into a single source of truth, with each citation linked to the verbatim source text.
Upload your community's bylaws, CC&Rs, and other governing documents in any format. Commonwise reads them and identifies your community's name, jurisdiction, type, and key dates — automatically.
AI breaks each document into individual rules and links each to its source text. Commonwise then connects those rules to applicable laws, resolves conflicts using the legal hierarchy, and produces a single rule set for your community.
Ask plain-language questions about any date — past or future. Commonwise finds the rules that apply and writes a cited answer. Compare two dates to see what changes.
Uploading your governing documents to ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot and asking questions often works fine for casual reading — but for governance decisions, the five differences below are what matter.
| General AI ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot | Commonwise Rules engine for community governance | |
|---|---|---|
| Conflict resolution |
General AI Reads your documents together, and will apply an authority hierarchy if you prompt it to — but not on its own, and only after it notices that two rules conflict. Conflicting provisions far apart in a long document are easily missed. | Commonwise Reconciles every rule across your documents when they're loaded, so conflicts surface up front. Resolves them by the legal authority hierarchy — CC&Rs over bylaws over rules, mandatory laws over community documents — and tells you which rule won, and why. |
| Applicable laws |
General AI Knows about laws from broad information on the web. The result may be approximate, out of date, or applied to communities the law doesn't actually govern. | Commonwise Loads the actual text of the applicable laws from authoritative sources. Applies only the sections that govern your community — based on its type, jurisdiction, and formation date. |
| Citations | General AI Citations in the answer are written by the AI itself. They sometimes reference text that doesn't actually appear in the source documents. | Commonwise Every citation links to the exact text in the source document — click to see it highlighted in context. References are validated against the source, so they never point to text that doesn't exist. |
| Reproducibility | General AI Different runs of the same question can return noticeably different answers. The AI generates each one as a fresh prediction, so the result varies. | Commonwise Same question, same community, same date — same citations, same conclusion. Which rules apply, and how they interact, is computed by code — not by AI. The AI is only used to phrase the result in plain language. |
| Time-aware answers |
General AI Answers describe current rules only. Cannot reliably compute what changes on a specific future or past date. | Commonwise Answer any question as of any date. Compare two dates to see exactly what changes for your community — useful for transition planning and historical questions. |
Make confident decisions backed by your actual governing documents. No more guessing what the bylaws say about quorum, assessments, or elections.
Manage multiple communities with clarity. Quickly find the rules that apply and understand how applicable laws interact with each community's documents.
Understand the rules that affect your property and your rights as a member. Get clear answers without reading hundreds of pages of legal text.
Trust comes from being able to check the work. Commonwise shows you exactly where each answer comes from — the documents, the law, and the reasoning that connects them.
Validated citations
Every citation links to the actual source text — and is verified against it.
Authority-aware resolution
When documents conflict, the legal hierarchy decides which rule wins.
Applicable laws
Loads the actual text of the applicable laws and applies the sections that govern your community.
Join the waitlist to be among the first to try Commonwise. We'll reach out when your spot is ready.
Want to see Commonwise in action? Tell us about your community and we'll set up a personalized walkthrough.