Once your short sale gets accepted and escrow opens, the escrow company will order all of the HOA CCRs, Bylaws and any other information that you need. Whatever requirements are needed by your lender to originate the loan should be ordered through escrow and you need to make sure that your loan officer orders any additional docs needed.
As you said that your home is an SFR you will not need to worry about an insurance certification from the HOA because you will be purchasing your own homeowners insurance. Again, and this bears repeating, make sure your loan officer works with escrow to get any needed information from the HOA or property management company.
With regards to the HOA CCRs and Bylaws, those usually do not get ordered by the escrow company until escrow opens after your approval is obtained by the short sale lender. Please note ordering the HOA and CCR docs is not free. In most cases these docs are paid for by the seller but in some short sale cases and foreclosures the seller will not pay and the buyer needs to pay. Furthermore in some cases the payment needs to be made up front. Escrow will contact you about payment but you need to check with your agent with regards to you or the seller paying for them.
Unfortunately until you are actually in escrow obtaining any HOA information is hard because it is private information and you are not entitled to it. Once you do order all of the docs, you will be able to review them as you see fit. Sometimes after review there are additional questions and you may need to try to call some of the officers to get answers. In some cases that will be possible and in other cases it is not. Kind of a crapshoot.
