A Reston seller signing a listing agreement this fall is usually thinking about price, staging, and maybe which weekend to hold the open house. The document that actually controls when the home closes is one almost nobody mentions at that meeting: the Reston Association resale disclosure package.
Virginia law requires every Reston seller to obtain this package and hand it to the buyer before closing. Reston Association has fourteen days from the day it receives payment to deliver it. Once the buyer has it in hand, a state-mandated cancellation window opens, giving the buyer a set number of days to walk away from the deal after reading what's inside. Order the package the week you go under contract instead of the week you list, and you've stacked two separate clocks on top of your buyer's mortgage timeline before anyone has even scheduled an inspection.
Order It the Day You Sign, Not the Day You Get an Offer
The math is simple once it's laid out. Standard resale disclosure packages take up to fourteen business days to produce, according to Reston Association's own resale process documentation. There is no option to expedite. If a seller waits until a contract is ratified to request the package, that two-week production window now sits inside the contract's closing timeline rather than before it. Add the buyer's post-delivery cancellation period on top, and a seller who assumed a routine 45 to 60 day path from contract to settlement can find several weeks of it consumed by paperwork that had nothing to do with financing or the home inspection.
The fix costs nothing but timing. Reston Association allows an owner or an authorized agent to order the package as soon as a home is listed, well before a buyer exists. Sellers who request it on day one of the listing typically have it in hand before an offer even arrives, which means the buyer's cancellation window starts and closes early in the process instead of eating into the back end of a contract.
There's a second clock worth knowing about. Reston Association's own paperwork specifies that a resale certificate is valid for the year it's ordered, but if settlement happens more than ninety days after the original package was released, the resale inspection portion is no longer considered current. A home that sits on the market for three months after the package was pulled needs a fresh look before closing. For most Reston listings that sell within a normal window this never becomes an issue. For a home that lingers, it's one more reason pricing correctly from the start matters more than it might seem.
The $890 Number Only Tells Half the Story
Reston Association's board approved a 5 percent increase to the annual assessment for 2026, raising it to $890 from $848, in a 7-2 vote at its November 13 meeting, according to reporting from FFXnow. Owners who qualify for the Fairfax County Tax Relief Program pay $445 instead. Payment is due January 1, with late fees applying to anything paid after March 1. At settlement, buyers also account for a transfer fee, set at $374 for 2026 under Section V.12(b) of the Reston Deed of Dedication.
None of those numbers are secret. They're published on Reston Association's own site and show up in most listing conversations. What doesn't show up as often is the second fee sitting behind the first one. Reston counts more than 160 separate cluster and condominium associations layered inside the master association, and a property can carry just the RA assessment or that fee plus a cluster or condo charge on top of it. One cluster assessment recently ran $1,880 a year, more than double the master fee by itself. A buyer comparing two homes at the same list price in different clusters could be looking at a difference of over $100 a month in carrying costs that never appears in the listing photos or the price per square foot.
| Fee | 2026 Amount | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| RA annual assessment | $890 ($445 with tax relief) | Yearly, due Jan. 1 |
| RA transfer fee | $374 | One time, at settlement |
| Example cluster assessment | $1,880 | Yearly |
The resale disclosure package is what surfaces this. It includes the property's current RA assessment status along with the governing documents, recent board minutes, and reserve information a buyer needs to understand what they're actually inheriting. A seller who orders both the RA package and, where applicable, the cluster or condo package at the same time gives a buyer's agent everything needed to evaluate carrying costs in one pass, rather than in a scramble once a contract is already running against a clock.
Not Every Address Inside Reston Pays That Fee At All
The assumption that every home inside Reston's boundary belongs to Reston Association turns out to be wrong for a meaningful number of newer addresses. FFXnow reported in 2023 that more than 3,000 approved housing units in Reston's transit station areas came through without an RA membership commitment attached to the deed. Developers Comstock, EYA, and Aperture opted out of joining. Sekas, Pulte, and Toll Brothers signed on. Properties inside Reston Town Center answer to the Reston Town Center Association instead of RA altogether.
The practical effect cuts both ways. A condominium near a Metro station that skipped RA membership also skips the $890 fee, but it skips pool and tennis access along with it. For a seller, this means confirming RA status for the specific address rather than assuming it based on the ZIP code or the marketing language in a listing. For a buyer comparing two condos near Wiehle-Reston East, the one without RA membership isn't a worse product, it's a different product, and the resale disclosure package (or its absence) is what tells you which one you're looking at.
What This Means Before You List
The mechanics here aren't complicated once someone walks through them, but almost none of them are visible from a listing sheet or a portal search. A seller who orders the resale disclosure package the same day the listing goes live, confirms whether a cluster or condo association applies, and checks the reserve information and recent board minutes for pending special assessments has already cleared the friction points that catch most Reston transactions off guard. A seller who waits until there's a signed contract is negotiating against a paperwork clock they didn't know was running.
Reston's assessment structure isn't unusual for a planned community, and the fees themselves fund the pools, trails, and lakes that make the neighborhood what it is. The part worth getting right is sequencing. The package that discloses those fees to a buyer is also the document that can add or remove weeks from a closing date, depending entirely on when it's ordered.
If you're getting ready to list in Reston this fall and want a straight read on how the resale disclosure timeline affects your specific address and cluster, Artie Korangy Homes can walk through it with you before the listing goes live, not after an offer is already on the table.
