Self Management for Condo Associations: 5 Secrets to a Happier Community

Key Takeaways:

• Transparency builds trust, which can enhance the quality of life (and property values) within your COA.
• Encourage community involvement to transform mere property owners into real neighbors.
• Manage COA money effectively, and communicate that management to stakeholders.
• Consider using community association software to ensure accuracy, efficiency, and accountability in managing the COA’s
• No one can serve on a COA board indefinitely. Recruit and prepare new people for COA leadership succession, and cross-train current volunteers

Perhaps you dreamed of condo life as a series of sunsets on the balcony, occasional dinners with close friends, and a comfortable suite that needs no care more than a grocery delivery when you return from extended travels. Perhaps noisy neighbors, maintenance issues, and constantly climbing fees, though, interrupted your reverie, and now you, purely in self-defense, are on the COA board. No magic formulas exist for condo management, but several principles can serve condo community leaders and their constituents well.

Foster Trust with Transparent Communication

The value of transparency is best understood in its absence: Few things can foster dissatisfaction among condo owners more quickly than the feeling that the COA is keeping them in the dark. Make it a principle on your board to earn trust by promoting transparency at every opportunity.

It should be a bedrock promise that a member of your COA board will collectively respond to every message of concern in a timely manner. Even the most difficult person in the community deserves an answer, if possible, or at least an acknowledgment of their suggestion or complaint. (Board members should be assigned specific days or weeks for this task so no messages slip through the cracks and no one is unfairly burdened with on-call days.) One way PayHOA’s community association software can help that effort is with built-in request workflows for maintenance and other requests.

Transparency extends far beyond returning calls and answering emails, of course. Open, consistent, and intentional communication with members is vital. A community website and emailed newsletters can keep residents informed about COA decisions, meetings (agendas in advance and minutes afterward), upcoming projects, and community events. Redundancy of communications—using website, email, and text reminders about upcoming meetings and events, for instance—makes it easier for distracted residents to keep up.

Encourage Community Involvement

Community involvement is the surest way to help transform owners of neighboring units into actual neighbors. From serving on the board to serving barbecue at the 4th of July picnic, working together connects faces to apartments, names to faces, and personalities to names. 

Such involvement gives residents a chance to use their talents for their own fulfillment and for the community’s benefit, whether it’s creating that aforementioned website, checking on older or physically challenged neighbors who don’t have family living nearby, or manning committees for various initiatives, can provide a sense of ownership and collaboration. 

It can be about fun, too: Organizing a holiday decoration competition, providing acoustic background music at the spring potluck, and leading a book club discussion also give residents new reasons and opportunities to get to know each other. PayHOA community association software can help organize any community social event or initiative.

Implement Effective Financial Management

When community members have major concerns about how their COA’s dues, fees, and assessments are being managed, concern often turns into suspicion, suspicion becomes discontent, and discontent morphs into conflict. Fiscal responsibility, including the sharing of supporting documentation, helps prevent that downspiral.

Financial management starts with understanding the laws and regulations applicable to COAs. Each board must also establish and follow clear accounting principles, a task aided by community association software, which also makes it easy to share appropriate documents with residents/owners, regulators, tax professionals, attorneys, and anyone else with a role and an interest in the organization’s management.

Other major aspects of COA financial management include:

• Budgeting accurately and adjusting as needed.
• Timely and accurate billing, perhaps aided by an online portal for convenient payments.
• Collection of any accounts that become delinquent.
• Monthly review and timely payment of vendor invoices.
• Periodic review of contracts to compel competitive pricing.
• Proper insurance and bonding to protect the COA’s assets from disaster or fraud.
• Investing adequate reserves for disaster recovery, planned maintenance, legal contingencies, and community improvements — special assessments rarely needed .
• Securing periodic independent audits.
• Providing appropriate financial reports to community residents online and making COA documents (other than personnel matters and any others restricted by law) available for review in person.

Leverage Community Management Software for Efficiency

Adopting job-specific technology for community management can streamline COA operations by automating countless tasks. With PayHOA’s system, maintenance and other requests have their own workflow. Unlimited texting, voicemail, and email functions enable board members and residents to tailor communication to groups as focused as clubs and committees and as broad as the entire COA population.

Purpose-specific community association software should also offer other features that help create a happy populace:

• A website builder creates an online location for purposes as diverse as updating community calendars, archiving board minutes, publishing bylaws and covenants, voting on officers and initiatives, updating policies, and providing interaction between board members and condo owners.
• Automated electronic invoicing provides digital proof of receipt and avoids the delays and lost bills inherent in paper-based billing.
• Automated account reconciliation and one-time data entry reduce the opportunity for human error in accounting functions.
• Real-time accounting features built into COA software so board members can review any transaction at any time as needed.
• Payment portals make it convenient to pay COA dues and other fees by eCheck or debit/credit card and, as with electronic invoicing, eliminate the delays and lost checks common with mailed payments.
• Military-grade security and frequent backups ensure COA administrative data safety.

If your condo association is considering upgrading its use of technology but has some reservations, PayHOA offers a free 30-day trial to see just how game-changing it can be.

Planning for Leadership Succession

Preparing for future leadership transitions by identifying and mentoring potential board members ensures continuity and stability. Encouraging community involvement and providing training opportunities can help cultivate capable leaders from within the association.

Common reasons COAs struggle with leadership succession may include: 

• Absence of a succession plan (failure of current board members to identify, engage, and recruit potential leaders).
• Board member fear of change, or the desire to hold onto power.
• Sudden vacancies with unexpected relocations or volunteer burnout.

COA officers’ acknowledgment that they are not indispensable gives the impetus to implement a succession plan. It involves a shared determination always to be recruiting and developing new talent, starting with just paying attention to who is already active in the community and inviting them into a series of increasingly complex community roles.

The ideal planned succession for a COA includes a target date for a current leader to depart, with a successor candidate trained and experienced enough to step into the role. Done well, it can lead to decades of healthy continuity by bringing in enthusiastic new faces while simultaneously acknowledging the emotional aspects of departure to longtime community servants.

It’s a rare COA that doesn’t have an emergency vacancy on its board from time to time. The best solution is to have a ready successor trained for every position, but that isn’t always possible. Second best may be to have board members cross-trained on each job so if one person has a health crisis, an unexpected move, or just a sudden change of heart about COA service, the others can keep the board’s work on track.

Intuitive, user-friendly PayHOA community association software offers new recruits an easy learning curve and helps prepare them to be the next cohort of COA leaders.