What This Statute Says
This is the citation statute that names the article. It is the door into a set of procedures that let Arizona property owners remove unlawful restrictions, most famously historical race-based covenants, from the recorded chain of title.
This article may be cited as the uniform unlawful restrictions in land records act.
A.R.S. § 33-531The statutes that follow define the terms (33-532), authorize amendment by an owner (33-533) or by an association of owners (33-534), and set the recording requirements (33-535 through 33-539).
When This Statute Comes Into Play
The Act applies whenever an Arizona property carries a covenant that the law no longer permits. The most common example is a racial restriction included in mid-twentieth-century subdivision documents. These restrictions are legally unenforceable today, but they often still appear in the recorded chain of title, surfacing when families pull a title report during a refinance, sale, or estate distribution.
The Act gives owners a recorded way to strike the restriction from the document as it applies to their property, without needing the cooperation of the original drafter or a court order.
What This Means for Arizona Families
If you discover an offensive or otherwise unlawful covenant in the recorded documents tied to your Arizona home, you are not stuck with it on your title. You or your homeowners association can record an amendment that removes the restriction. The amendment travels with your property and shows up in future title searches alongside the original document.
For families settling an estate, this is one of the small acts of stewardship that comes up during the title cleanup phase. A personal representative who pulls a title report and notices an old, plainly unlawful restriction can use the Act to clean the record before transferring the home to the heirs or to a buyer. Our FAQ on valid property deeds in Arizona covers the broader recording landscape. The real estate the family inherits is the same; what changes is that the next owner will not have to read the restriction on their report.