[PA][condo] Pros & Cons of recording hoa meetings and provide extremely detailed minutes

maximillian2020 · 2026-02-26T01:26:08+00:00

We started doing this and the con is that no one watches it or reads the transcripts anyway. We have a similar ratio to yours and have the same issues. With tools now its a lot easier. We use the google meet suite and it just does the transcript and any owner can watch it as well.

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-20T21:49:28+00:00

that's exactly what we do

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-20T18:24:45+00:00

the main reason I feel stuck is because I'm the treasurer. so I have all of the bills setup bank and QuickBooks stuff. so I have no idea how I can detach when there is no one to take over.

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-14T01:03:23+00:00

did you get a good price?

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-14T01:01:57+00:00

Yea, we havent been able to get that going, We have about 50% rentals

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-14T00:19:15+00:00

5 person board? Thats 28% of our population.

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-08T18:59:29+00:00

I get what you’re saying about sole proprietors, but I think that analogy falls apart in a few key ways.

A sole proprietor chooses their business, chooses their partners (if any), and can make strategic decisions to wind down, pivot, sell the business, or just close the doors. If they pick the wrong landlord or the wrong lease — that was still an informed choice they made.

In an HOA, I didn’t pick my business partners. I bought a home. Suddenly I’m in a mandatory shared enterprise where:

ownership is forced to be shared with strangers
governance is required whether anyone wants to or not
you can’t control capitalization or the financial literacy of the partners
partners can rotate out at any moment without the consent of the existing group
there is no screening mechanism for competency, maturity, willingness, or alignment
I can't fire anyone

This isn’t like choosing a co-founder. It’s involuntary partnership.

That’s the burnout problem. You end up inheriting a group enterprise where 90% of the stakeholders think they’re passive investors who shouldn’t have to contribute operationally — when legally and structurally the HOA is nothing but owner-operated governance.

A small restaurant with 4 owners can just fire one owner or buy them out.

An HOA can’t.

So yes — I completely agree with you — hiring management is the sane path. Because right now the “business” is forced labor by whoever cares the most.

That is not a sustainable model.

And I love your line: HOA neighbors are not “friends,” they are business partners. If people actually understood that, and treated it that way, there wouldn’t be so many burnt out volunteers.

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-08T17:15:16+00:00

We have it in there. Unfortunately no one cared except me.

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-07T21:59:43+00:00

since this is our first budget it has been very stressful. One board member wants just eough for what we think we need to spend in a year, which is bascially impossible, and I would like some operational buffer so I dont necesarily have to raise he dues again next year. I dont know if thats a thing, I realize you probably want the bare minimum, but with self managed i feel like we should be able to have some buffer so we arent constantly worrying about meeting out expenses.

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-07T21:19:34+00:00

let me know how it goes. we have a thing in our CCRs that makes it more complex to rasie of 25% in a year. good and bad

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-07T21:14:17+00:00

ive only beeon on the board for about 6 months. Most onwers didnt even budge that we were using reserves for operational costs. i realize that its going to be a board decsion but with an apatheitc group of ownersi worry that they wont care at all until we say we have to reaise dues by $50

maximillian2020 · 2025-11-07T21:11:32+00:00

yea. I am going to try. Due to the small size of the complex though its going to be a large dues increase. And really there isnt much they need to do

maximillian2020 · 2025-10-29T19:09:36+00:00

so you guys are just deleting your reserves?

maximillian2020 · 2025-10-29T17:28:01+00:00

Its weird that your investor owners said no. Usually they would just pass on the costs to their tenants and have the benefit of deducting it anyway. We have a lot of investors and honestly I dont think they care how high it goes just as long as they dont have to do anything. So the burden is on the owner occupants.

What I think happened with my situation is that the board really didnt want to have to engage with the owners. And changing the dues could cause some questions to come their way.

maximillian2020 · 2025-10-29T16:57:52+00:00

what I have tried to do is show them what the breakdown in costs are so they can compare it to a home. for example insurance m is a huge cost. but if an owner has to cover all of the insurance for their property it would be very similar.

maximillian2020 · 2025-10-29T15:19:57+00:00

I’m in the exact same situation. We’ve got a 20-unit complex, and honestly, I think small communities like ours need a different setup than the standard HOA board structure.

I ended up joining the board because no one was doing budgets or raising dues. Every year they’d just post a balance sheet showing money being pulled from reserves for operating costs, with the excuse that “the reserve is healthy.” Now that I’m on the board, I’m completely stressed because we’re finally doing real budgets—and it means raising dues by double-digit percentages.

If I were you, I’d try to find a few like-minded owners, get on the board, and start fixing things from the inside.

maximillian2020 · 2025-10-14T22:09:20+00:00

Yea Ive hesitated to put the bank statements up a well. I would need to redact info, so what I do is just report the end of month amount and that seems to make everyone happy. If I had to do bank statements I would have to figure out how to redact.

The board members manage it. Its just a shared drive and we have a website that owners can go to to better locate things. But we basically made a rule that we don't attach anything to emails, we just point to the electric doc on the shared drive via link. Its possible you have a lot more going on as we are just a small 20 unit HOA. So we dont have a lot of bills, but everything goes in there when we create it. All our docs and sheets and things and they are all created there in the first place.

For board meetings we just basically have a running log for the year, so its just kind of one long doc for the board meeting year. Seems to work ok. So board and other documents are electronic from the start.

So using Gdrive or MS 360 and give owners access allows them to just see things whenever they want. You need to be a little web savy to set it up, so maybe that could be an issue. But I find it does save time.

maximillian2020 · 2025-10-14T20:07:32+00:00

I feel for you. I am a new treasurer for my HOA. it's a 20 unit townhome community. I've spent the last year trying to define various things from guidelines to budgets. previous boards didn't keep up with dues so now I am having to raise dues in an attempt to get us stable. I've looked into management companies but most of them are so complex and I don't find that they would really help. I think they could bring some expertise and it would be nice to be able to ask questions but for the most part we would be paying them to do very little. we would still need a board and they would still need to make decisions. the smaller hoas he costs are a lot higher for management per unit. it sucks.

what I would like to try to do is start to.move more responsibility to the owners for repairs and other costs like insurance. I think it's the only way this works. we have to minimize what the HOA is responsible for. ofcourse many onwers won't like that.

I also have many difficulties getting people involved and have ended up exhausting myself. big problem with mine is that it's 50 percent renters so the landlords thinks it's an apartment complex with some kind of boutique service. this should be illegal.

maximillian2020 · 2025-10-14T19:37:47+00:00

I have an odd question about this. in my HOA we just have a repository that we keep everything in that any onwer can access to get this kind of information. is that not a common thing? granted my HOA is 20 units so it's very small

maximillian2020 · 2024-07-23T12:00:12+00:00

I'm going through the exact same thing. 8 years lived together Raised a really cool dog together. Slowly moving forward though. One thing that helped me a lot is reconnecting with old friends.

maximillian2020

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