Home Place Ranch: Who Runs the Ranch

Home Place Ranch has no independent homeowners association. Its covenants are written, and enforced, by companies that answer to the same builder.

Second in a three-part examination of Home Place Ranch. Part 1: the promise versus what was built. Part 2: who controls the community. Part 3: drainage, stormwater and fire.

Home Place Ranch is developed, built, and governed by a single organization — The Challenger Group of Colorado Springs — and, in the seats that matter most, by the same handful of its executives. A Challenger entity is the developer of record; the Challenger homebuilder sells the houses; and a metropolitan district staffed by Challenger’s own executives writes and enforces the neighborhood’s rules. Follow any thread — the land, the construction, the covenants — and it leads back to one address: The Challenger Group’s headquarters at 8605 Explorer Drive.

The developer polices itself

That control does not end at the sale.

Home Place Ranch has no independent homeowners association. Its recorded covenants — drafted by the declarants, Challenger Colorado, LLC and HPR Development, LLC — expressly state the community is not a common-interest community under Colorado’s HOA law. Instead, covenant enforcement, design review, and common-area landscaping are assigned to a metropolitan district: Triview Metropolitan District No. 3.

And that district is Challenger. Its board, per the district’s own filings, is composed of Challenger executives: its president, Matthew Rankin, is also a president of Challenger Homes; Tom Hennessy, president of Challenger Homes, is the district’s vice-president; and its treasurer and secretary hold finance and accounting roles at the company. Day-to-day administration is contracted to an outside firm, CliftonLarsonAllen — a national accounting company headquartered in Minneapolis, not anyone local to Monument. The district levies about 69 mills (69.261 in 2026) on Home Place Ranch property owners — the larger share of a roughly 90-mill Triview-district burden, layered on top of the ordinary county, town, school and fire taxes. (What a metro district is, how it differs from an HOA, and why two homes in the same town can owe very different taxes, is the subject of a companion explainer.)

In plainer terms: the company that drafted the covenants also controls the board that enforces them, funded by a tax on the homeowners. There is no independent body — no resident-run HOA — standing between the developer and the rules.

What self-enforcement looks like

The consequence of a developer-run covenant regime is visible on the ground.

Residents of all three neighborhoods described the same contrast to this newspaper: in Promontory Pointe and Sanctuary Pointe — conventional communities with homeowners associations — covenants are visibly and consistently enforced. Cars are not left parked along the streets or crowding every driveway; common areas are maintained and in line with Town code. Home Place Ranch, by their account and this newspaper’s observation, is different: dozens of cars line the streets and fill driveways — with trailers and RVs a regular sight as well — and shared spaces have gone untended.

The neglect runs past the built streets. Across the undeveloped ground the Challenger entities still own — and worst along the drainage swale on the southern boundary — the land is choked with weeds grown well over waist-high, many times the nine inches at which Monument’s weed code treats growth as a nuisance (§ 8.28.045). Among it is musk thistle, a state-designated “List B” noxious weed; Monument’s ordinance folds in Colorado’s Noxious Weed Act (§ 8.28.140), which requires a landowner to control such species and lets the Town compel it — and, failing that, abate the weeds and bill the owner. The wildfire danger this creates is taken up in Part 3. The point here is narrower: the same covenants Challenger drafted demand that ground be kept “free from … weeds” and clear of fire-prone brush, and Challenger’s executives run the district meant to enforce them — yet the company’s own land stands in violation of those covenants and of the Town’s and the state’s weed laws alike.

One homeowner of nearly two years, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said the district is budgeted for a single covenant-compliance inspection a month and caps fines at $10 per violation a day — far below the sums other Colorado districts levy on repeat violators. He said he raised that enforcement gap, and a broader information vacuum, directly with the district’s CliftonLarsonAllen manager and its president; both agreed residents needed better information and promised a newsletter, he says, that has not appeared. Homeowners have been told little, he says, about covenant enforcement, open-space upkeep, future phases, or how the metro district and its debt work — and many, having moved from out of state, have never dealt with a Colorado metro district before. Those figures are the resident’s account; Home Place Ranch’s recorded covenants set no dollar fine schedule, leaving the amount to the district.

The contrast with a conventional association is concrete. Next door in Promontory Pointe — governed by the Promontory Pointe EPC Owners Association, an ordinary Colorado HOA — the penalties are written down and public: a warning, then $25, $50 and $100 for repeat violations of the same rule, with chronic offenders turned over to the association’s attorney. Home Place Ranch’s recorded covenants lay out no such schedule at all.

The design guidelines the district administers are not short on rules. Garage doors “shall be kept closed … to maintain a pleasing appearance”; driveways and parking are regulated; landscaping must be “maintained in a neat and attractive condition.” The question this series returns to is not whether the rules exist. It is who is accountable for enforcing them — and whether a district run by the developer’s own executives will hold the developer’s community to them.

Part 3 examines what has happened to the physical community those rules were meant to protect: the drainage, the stormwater, and the fire risk.

Sources for this installment: El Paso County Clerk & Recorder deeds and the Colorado Secretary of State business database for the Challenger-affiliated entities; the recorded Declaration of Covenants (Reception 223000967) and the Home Place Ranch Design Guidelines; Triview Metropolitan District No. 3 filings (board roster, 2026 budget, CliftonLarsonAllen management); El Paso County Assessor records for the district mill levies; Promontory Pointe’s recorded covenants and its Covenant and Rule Enforcement Policy, for the fine-schedule comparison; the metro-district structure explained in this newspaper’s companion Triview report; and interviews with residents of the three neighborhoods, one of whom is unnamed at his request. The rules for how Colorado metropolitan districts are governed and turned over to residents draw on the state Division of Local Government’s special-district guidance and the Common Interest Ownership Act (C.R.S. § 38-33.3); director eligibility is set by C.R.S. § 32-1-103(5), and the timing of any turnover of District No. 3 is governed by its service plan, on file with the Town.