Shared walls and PUD common areas create liability questions a single-family policy never answers.

When a fire or water event crosses a shared wall between two townhome units, the association's master policy, each owner's HO-6 or homeowner's policy, and any lender-required coverage all potentially respond, and the CC&Rs are supposed to say which one pays first. Many older CC&Rs do not say clearly.

We read the CC&Rs' maintenance and repair-obligation language before placing coverage, so the master policy actually lines up with who is responsible for what.

We map the association's actual maintenance obligations under the CC&Rs against the master policy's coverage triggers, so a party-wall claim resolves against a known answer instead of a dispute between two owners' carriers.

Private streets, retention ponds, shared drainage easements, and small recreational amenities each carry distinct liability exposure. A flat per-door general liability limit, common in boilerplate HOA packages, does not reflect what a specific PUD actually owns and maintains.

We size general liability and umbrella limits against the specific common-area inventory, not a per-door rule of thumb.

We inventory the association's actual common-area assets, streets, drainage, amenities, and size liability and umbrella limits against that inventory rather than a flat per-door assumption.

In most planned unit developments the individual homeowner carries an HO-3 on their own structure, and the association's master program insures only the common areas: private streets, drainage, clubhouse, pool, signage, and shared landscaping. That is the opposite of a condo master, which typically insures the buildings themselves and leaves owners an HO-6 for the interior. When a PUD is placed on a condo master form by default, the association pays to insure structures its owners already cover, or the CC&Rs quietly make some element (a shared roof, a common wall, an attached garage bank) an association responsibility that no one insured at all.

The recorded declaration is the only document that settles which model applies. We read it before quoting, so the master matches the ownership line rather than whichever form the last renewal happened to use.

We confirm from the declaration whether structures are owner-insured or association-insured, then scope the master to the common-area inventory and flag any shared structural element the CC&Rs push onto the association. Where owners face a master-deductible pass-through on a common-area loss, we note it early, since an owner's HO-3 loss-assessment endorsement caps deductible assessments at $1,000 under the unedited ISO form, and that sublimit can usually be raised on request once owners know the master deductible figure.

The commercial general liability on the common areas answers for bodily injury and property damage: a slip on the pool deck, a fall on a private street, and its defense costs sit outside the limit. It does not answer for a claim against the board over a governance decision: an architectural denial, an assessment increase, a reserve-funding dispute, a selective-enforcement complaint. Those are directors and officers claims, and in a self-managed townhome or PUD association they are the more common way a board actually gets sued.

Carrying a per-occurrence general liability limit at or above the $1M lender floor does nothing for a D&O exposure, and many small PUD programs never separate the two.

We place common-area general liability at or above the $1M per-occurrence floor with an umbrella over it for amenity-heavy communities, and a separate D&O policy that pays defense costs for governance claims, commonly in the $1M to $3M range for a community of this size. On the D&O we read the covenant-enforcement carve-back closely, since covenant and architectural disputes are exactly where a townhome or PUD board's governance claims tend to land.