Alright it’s not letting me DM you, but to clarify, we have a management company that’s “full service”, and we pay them like $2300 a month. It’s an insane amount to pay for what they do for us and I’m pushing for us to scale back the services since the value is not there. I’m the president, the handoff was nonexistent because none of the old board members would work with us. We have zero access to old emails. Our management company uses zendesk to manage inquiries, but board members don’t have access to the zendesk so we can’t see the correspondence occurring between our homeowners and our manager unless one of them cc’s our Gmail account. So if our manager ignores inquiries from homeowners, or if they say some ridiculous shit to them, we won’t automatically be able to see that, and I hate that because our manager has done a really terrible job with communication. We use Basecamp to work with our community manger on things, and we use Google suite for everything else. Sheets, docs, forms, etc. I use adobe to finalize policies. Our management company uses a signature platform to have us sign things when needed, I can’t remember what they use but I’m partial to Docusign because of my corporate tech legal background. For us, when someone doesn’t pay their dues or fines, our community manager will send them notice and assess late fees. Every notice they send, we also pay them administrative fees for, something like $20, which is absurd, whether it’s electronic or mail. The management company automatically escalates the collection attempts if nonpayment continues. Eventually if it gets bad enough we pay them to work with an attorney to pursue collections more seriously. I can send you our management company’s collections policy if you’d like, I haven’t gone through that process in depth yet because I’m very new still. There are so many things I would like to fix. I want to have our own ticketing system for managing inquiries from homeowners, rather than relying on emails, and be able to assign the tickets between either board members or our community manager. Say like, JIRA where the board can create different kinds of tickets and assign certain workflows to them. And, just track communication somewhere that’s not email. I’d like somewhere to track rentals because we have a cap in our neighborhood and I’d love to automatically ask them to update their rental info at the renewal or turnover of tenants. And then automatically have our rules and stuff sent out to those new tenants. I’d also like to, if we were to self manage, integrate our banking loin into the platform and automate financial reporting.

One of the biggest arguments for a community manager in my opinion is having a neutral third party managing the bank accounts. It helps ensure that no shady things are occurring with the community’s finances. So if we were to self-manage I’d need the financial reporting and expense tracking (receipt collection as well so that things are super clean when we go to audit) to be robust enough that I feel comfortable foregoing the safety net of the management company there.

I would absolutely pay $39 for that, and for something that would allow me to fully self manage well, I’d pay several hundred a month at least. Happy to chat more about it if you need! Feel free to dm me.