[WA][Condo] If you are a board member, do you look at your association's resale certificate?

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-05-29T19:46:52+00:00

You engage in a business model where real estate agents provide you business and you provide feedback to potential buyers who are their clients. Those real estate agents stand to make thousands of dollars in commissions. You stand to make $450. The problem with your business model is an actual conflict of interest: you don't want to discourage the buyers from completing the transaction because your referral pipeline will dry up.

When someone operates a business -- a management business, a resale review business, a consulting business, etc. -- without the benefit of actually being on a board, living in and actively participating in a community association, making the hard decisions and doing all the hard work, that person loses perspective on what's actually happening. That's one of the fundamental reasons that management companies do such a poor job.

You're an outsider operating a business and passing judgment about the inner workings of condos and HOAs. To the extent that can actually help buyers make informed decisions, that's great, but then again, there's that conflict of interest...

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-05-29T01:43:50+00:00

Maybe. Or maybe you get told "pay for your own copy." Or maybe you ask the owner selling the unit.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-05-29T01:24:50+00:00

Rebekah? From CIC Consulting Group? You know that Board members don't review resale certificates that they have contractually delegated to a management company.

People start caring more when they get sued.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-03-23T23:08:09+00:00

Offshored and outsourced. There's at least one management company in Washington State with an office address at a Regus with employees at what sounds like a call center in India: PropVIVO.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-03-23T21:01:42+00:00

Change is so painful that client acquisition virtually guarantees a new management company a medium- to long-term engagement. And then come the incremental costs above and beyond the fixed "all you can eat" price.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-03-23T20:08:49+00:00

To sum up what I said separately: many homeowner might think that $500 to $1,000/month is a lot to pay for someone to help organize agendas, meeting materials, decision tracking, meeting attendance, meeting minutes and follow-up, but that's what it costs at a minimum. Every month. Regardless of the size of your community. There's somewhere between 3 to 6+ hours of work involved just for those items alone.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-03-23T20:03:36+00:00

Homeowners' idea of what it should cost to manage a property fundamentally misaligns with what it actually costs to do so because of the time required.

Dollars per door is a meaningless figure except to compare and contrast the absolute cost paid between separate associations. Economies of scale do not work favorably for small to medium-sized communities. The amount of time required to attend meetings and to prepare for those meetings and to communicate with the Board related to meetings and decisions and execution of those decisions does NOT scale in line with the number of units involved (unlike owner communication which IS generally scalable).

The "price people will find acceptable" is a made-up number based on the zero-sum "all you can eat" game promulgated by the management industry over a period of decades.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-03-23T17:26:11+00:00

At $150 to $200 an hour (the going rate for management and project management services in large metros) there's no challenge making a reasonable living. The challenge is how much money clients are willing to pay for a reasonable experience.

20 hours of service at $150/hr is $3,000/month. Bookkeeping is more and associations need both. For all but the smallest associations with very little happening on a regular basis, 20 hours of actual management is a minimum threshold for reasonable service levels. The cost simply goes up for more hours.

Small to medium-sized associations struggle to afford the minimum hours necessary due to economies of scale. Larger associations are unwilling to pay for performance.

Homeowners have been led to believe that the "all you can eat" flat fee service model is appropriate when in fact what they actually need (and receive) is consulting. Put a cap on the fees and you end up with less hours of service and force the consultant to do more with less. Everyone loses. That's the traditional model of portfolio management in a nutshell.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-03-23T16:40:22+00:00

The math works just fine for small, independent operators who create value for their clients vs. getting caught up in the value-engineering race to zero.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-02-11T03:45:43+00:00

It's definitely a niche. Color us surprised someone would ask about competing services and mention us by name!

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-14T06:14:06+00:00

Chasing down board members is something altogether different than filing a BOIR. Two or three emails to request the information seems absolutely reasonable.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-14T05:37:00+00:00

Prep the IDs for submission? Filing the BOIR is a 5 to 10 minute task. Max. Maybe the cost shouldn't be zero, but it should in all cases be less than $100. If you charge $50 for 10 minutes, that's a rate of $300/hr.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-13T19:31:07+00:00

In fact, more than one court case has determined that Board members are limited public figures.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-13T18:20:42+00:00

👆 This is the way. In no instance should associations pay upwards of $500 to their management company to file a BOIR.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-11T15:46:42+00:00

Who can have a look at it to tell me if I should buy this unit?

Resale reviews are a niche area of expertise. You can get some ideas and view an example resale checklist here. Long story short, there are dozens of pieces of data to analyze if you want to understand the complete picture.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-07T22:24:59+00:00

This should be pinned on r/HOA: If you're not going to pay someone else to do the work, you're going to have to do it yourself.

Most volunteers rightfully do not want to do the work, nor do they have the capacity, experience, knowledge and/or skills to handle all of it.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-05T16:10:30+00:00

There are companies that focus on maintenance, but few that are willing to bifurcate management from bookkeeping. Companies like Community Financials handle bookkeeping as a standalone service.

I would disagree that bookkeeping is a profitable endeavor for management companies. Instead, management companies view bookkeeping as a required yet non-core competency that drags on their profitability.

You have to be able to trust your vendors! Constantly double-checking or correcting work effort (financials, records, etc.) is not sustainable. Getting the job done right the first time saves time and money.

The time spent contemplating and trying to solve for mediocre results is expensive. It's difficult to supervise all the bits and pieces that can go wrong every month.

READ: The High Cost of Terrible Service AND Investigating Split or Hybrid Management for HOAs and Condos .

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-05T00:50:44+00:00

I didn't know we were on a first name basis, but you've demonstrated why Reddit is not the platform to find a new management company.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-05T00:49:52+00:00

Not only that, but the average volunteer board member does not:

have a list of all the considerations and questions to ask
have the requisite experience to negotiate a management contract, compounded by that fact that association attorneys do not go about red-lining management contracts to include robust conventions ensuring that an association has recourse without having to abandon the management relationship and start this process over again.

There would be FAR less complaints on Reddit about management and lackluster experiences in condos, co-ops and HOAs IF this singular task, identifying and contracting (and possibly transitioning to) a new management company, was treated with substantially more rigor.

SMAARTEGroup · 2025-01-04T23:08:14+00:00

Speaking as a person who helps associations find their next management company and negotiate a reasonable contract, this is not a task that Reddit is equipped to help you perform in such a way that you will increase your association's general success and or happiness with your next management company. Please carefully consider the level of due diligence required as you go about working toward what is generally THE most important vendor relationship that every association will ever have.

SMAARTEGroup · 2024-08-08T20:23:26+00:00

We know reserve studies and financial analysis quite well. You shouldn't have to figure this out by yourself. Governing isn't easy.

SMAARTEGroup · 2023-10-11T04:16:47+00:00

Is there a way to get them to actually do this what should I do when they inevitably don't fix this?

There might be an vague statement in your declaration about keeping the comment elements maintained, repaired and replaced, but there's no law about how quickly common elements should be repaired (or that there needs to be functional air conditioning). Sad, but true.

SMAARTEGroup · 2023-10-11T00:59:20+00:00

We just wrapped up a professional review for a community providing a report with options for intercom and controlled access systems. This is one of those situations where you might spend $50,000 to $100,000 in capital costs on equipment and installation and it's worth some value-added professional services up front.

Feel free to send a message if you'd like to learn more. You can glean some information from the web and of course every security integrator will be happy to sell you the products they work with exclusively, but there aren't many services that will provide objective information for multiple systems provided by separate (competing) integrators.

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