Anticipating HOA issues

No offense BUT honestly you can throw that list out the window when you join your HOA or HOA board... Anticipating issues in a HOA is exactly what gets many of them in trouble. Best example: Running to a lawyer because someone may sue. Let them run to a lawyer and wait on the paperwork. Don't waste the time and effort preventing a lawsuit. If your doing things right, then why worry? If you have doubts your are, then you are validating they have a case. Have a good defense an counter sue. Your going to be sued or atleast threatened to be. Don't anticipate... activate!

If you run a HOA, you find it's a day by day thing. There is no one size fits all. You pull up your thread bearing bootstraps and back into the fire... What you can anticipate? That people will always ASSUME... We all know what ASSUME means... There is an @ss before you and me...

I think the answer is in the middle - no, you'll never be able to predict every little problem (if you could, most volunteers would run away screaming, never to return!) However, if boards work with their property manager and attorney (and association insurance carrier) to establish sound policies and procedures, that can go a long way in preventing problems, or at least have a systematic way of addressing them instead of reinventing the wheel every time.

Continuous training of the Board is always a good idea. When I served on my Board, one area that really irked me was that the majority didn't seem in attending seminars or even reading magazine articles on holding effective meetings, how to read the financial report, etc. Maybe they thought it wasn't necessary because we have a very good property manager, but even if you don't have to worry about the day to day stuff, you still need some knowledge on the bigger pictures so you can ask intelligent questions before making a decision.

Whatever else some of you think about CAI and its politics and/or who they really represent, they do have some great booklets and seminars on HOA budgeting, accounting, enforcing the rules, etc., and it seems to me if you're going to be on a HOA board, you need to be willing and able to take a little time to get some education on how to do it right. If there's no local chapter that sponsors seminars, ask your property manager if he/she can put together something. Or add some sort of board member education moment to the agenda once a quarter and bring in a local expert on issues like lawn care. OR designate someone to look at the HOA reference library on this website to select articles that the board should be educated on - that person can summarize the information and copies could be made available to the board to read at their leisure.

Finally, I think everyone should remember that HOA communities, like everything else in society, are constantly evolving. Something that worked for the last 5 years may need to be tweaked or revamped altogether, depending on changes in the law, what the homeowners want, their demographics and so on. I think the mindset of "we've always done it this way, so why change?" gets lots of communities in trouble because no one ever stopped to consider that perhaps there was a way to do it more efficiently - or they've done it incorrectly all along and now the stuff is hitting the fan.

We're in a high rise, so our Board needs to be prepared for water leaks/floods. What does each staffer do? Who do they call? So we have a protocol for that type of issues, for power outage in our elevator building, and for fire emergency.

Detached homes would create a different set of protocols and some are, in fact, predictable. Another thing you know for sure, Harvey, is that all of the components that your HOA sons will wear out some day. Getting an up-to-date reserve study will h ell you prepare for various components reaching the ends of their lives.

An annual calendar also is good to note the dates that various inspections are due, taxes, ect.

What great advice! What I am hearing is, a board should anticipate potential problems by reading and understanding your governing documents, because it is within them that you will see the potential for said problems and you can get the policies in place now to potentially avoid them.

Tim, that's a great list I had not seen before.

Question: If a self-managed HOA only has a few of those policies in place, and then hires a full-service Property Management company, do those companies typically have boilerplate policies they recommend to their HOA clients?

the property management is to do what the board tells them to do and what is in the contract. People forget that a MC is NOT an HOA member!!! They do not have to adhere or follow the HOA rules. They have to do what the HOA contract tells them to do in that regard. The HOA itself is in charge and hires out an MC to help them accomplish their goals. Lines get blurred often in this relationship. Hence why I try to remind those with MCs to establsh a line between the two. Each HOA is different so where that line is drawn is up to each one... Quite frankly in my self managed HOA I would not have an MC attend our meetings or hold them. However, other HOA they have their MC do the meetings and handle more things. It is what your HOA is comfortable with...

Again the board is the one ultimately responsible for following and adhering to the HOA rules and enforcing them. A MC is NOT a member of the HOA. It's good to have a "checks and balances" system in place but it should be internal. If your board is putting the HOA at risk by not following the rules, then it deserves what it gets. It should not blame the MC for their failures. The MC is not a scapegoat either.

Sorry but I believe a HOA is ultimately responsible for it's own actions and following the rules. They may do so with ASSISTANCE from the MC but NOT depend on the MC. That can lead to big mistakes in the long run. Using a MC as a "They/Them" source can damage the "You and Your neighbors" mentality.

As we found out personally, an MC we had, did not know our docs, did not know state law and pulled his answers out of his butt. And when the smelling stuff hit the oscillating air pusher, he walked away smelling like a rose and the board was nailed for all of it. And we took his lead.