Management Per Door fees

Hello again,
I am a board president at a Mid size 400 plus single family HOA in the Northern California area. We have had the same Management Company for the last 4 years. They are good but I would not call them great. I must admit that I am kind of a perfectionist and can micro manage a bit at times. I have been on the board for 7 years. I have worked with 2 Companies 3 different Property Managers. During this contract we have had the same PM for the entire time. She know our property well now and I feel her job is much easier than it has ever been since they took over.

If I were to be asked what would make the perfect Management company. I would say that the PM needs to be extremely organized. Very detail oriented and someone who is always on time. I also think that they need to know how to manage the customer base which in our case can at times be difficult. They should not let them keep them from doing their daily job. I have come to learn that Managers seem to manage by emergency. They tend to all be overworked and probably under paid. In our case we are not nearly big enough to have a full time manager so I understand that we are only getting about 25% of the managers time.

My question is what is a fair price to pay for Management in California? We are currently paying about $12.50 per door and we also pay another approximately $5.00 per door for the mailings and extra meeting time and other miscellaneous extra charges. They are asking for an additional $.50 per door. Is $13.00 per door a decent price or do we need to start shopping around to see what is out there? This is not something I am in favor doing because I know that we could always do worse. I also understand that change is hard for our Homeowners.

Any thoughts?

Richard,
We actually tried to my displeasure to have the PM onsite one day a week to focus on our property. I voted against it 3 years ago. We tried it for a few months and it did not work out for the reasons below.

1) In todays world of Cell phones and email it is impossible for a Manager to ignore all of the distractions from other clients.

2) They were charging us $500.00 monthly for this extra. We saw no extra benefit.

3) We found that Homeowners that had little to do would stop by and talk or complain taking up much of the PMs time. I know this is something the PM should be able to control but it was an issue.

To answer your question our annual Management cost range between 92K to 96K.

Their office is located about 45 minutes from our community but the PM lives in a nearby town and schedules meetings in the mornings and late afternoon. I also am retired and meet vendors when asked to by management.

Don't mean to thread jump, but I'm finding the Operating Cost Manual very informative even though I'm not in California. Thank you, Richard, for recommending that (even though you didn't necessarily recommend it to me).

Mark,

Your expenses for having a management company sound like they are about what they would be if your association had your own full-time employee to take care of day-to-day tasks.

One of the problems with having contracted managers is that they are never really under your control and, as you have seen, their availability is subject to the whims of the management company.

My association exists mostly to maintain about 300 miles of dirt roads. We used to have a contractor doing the work but we were neither his only customer nor his favorite customer and the relationship became quite contentious. Because road maintenance is a job that will never be finished, we bit the bullet and bought our own equipment and hired our own employees. Life became much better once the contractor was history.

I think you will find it worthwhile to hire your own employee and deep-six the management company.