Recommendations for HOA management company in Seattle area

Our association manager just moved out of state after 7 years managing our property. She was excellent and pretty much the only reason our HOA stayed with the management company. The new manager the company assigned to us is not promising, so we're looking to interview other companies. We're fairly large, 204 townhomes in our HOA, in the Seattle area (Eastside). If anyone has a recommendation of a management company in the area, please message me or let me know how I can send you my email address. Thanks.

I really don't think posting your email address is going out to the WHOLE internet, but nice try.

I figure camp #2 are people who know how not to get spam?

OP here. I haven't gotten any recommendations for the Seattle area yet (but no spam either!).

So I've read many articles online on how to select an HOA management company. I've asked for recommendations from many others in the community and neighboring HOAs. That's a start but unfortunately their HOAs are not as large as ours (204 units) and their service requirements are different from ours.

So I'm thinking is there any way to search for HOAs in my area as well as their unit sizes? I'd like to find a way to contact the large ones to see who they have and whether they are satisfied, as I think that would be a better way to narrow down the search based on number of units managed. We want to find someone who can competently manage a large size HOA like ourselves.

Any ideas on this or in general searching for HOA management company would be appreciated.

Here is a list of management companies and individual managers from the CAI Washington State website.

https://www.wscai.org/resources/service-provider-directory/listing-category/management-companies-individual-managers/

I think we currently have one poster from WA, Mark.

An HOA your size (same as our high rise) might have an HOA attorney, who might be able to help. Ia free size does mater, but it also might matter whether you're high rise condos with many reserves components & amenities or detached homes with few and with few amenities. r something in between.

The webistes for all the condos around here show who their MC is. Have your searched the websites of HOAs similar to yours for that info?

OP here. Our 204 units are townhomes, not a high-rise, over several acres of land. I spent a couple hours on the WSCAI list of firms, looking only at the ones that were primarily focused on HOA property management (as opposed to rentals, etc), with an office on the Eastside (will expand to Seattle if I have to). Then on the individual company websites, I tried to look for ones that had a list of staff and highly credentialed (any combo of CMCA, AMS, PCAM) agents since we are looking for full-service management. I sent an email to about 3 or 4 companies that met all these requirements and asked for specific references with Board member contact info. We'll see if these companies are willing to provide that at this point.

We do have an HOA attorney, but since I am not on the Board, I cannot directly ask. We have 2 neighboring HOAs, both much smaller than ours. One is satisfied with their manager and the other is not. So I put the satisfied one on the list to be considered as well. I do not know of a way to easily find other HOAs in my area and even if I did, I would have no idea who their Board members are.

Thanks to everyone for all the input and hopefully my approach to this will yield some good candidates for our Board to consider.

Just curious, Leila: if you're not on the Board, where does your authorization to talk with MCs come from? Does the Board know you're pursuing this project?

As long as she's not misrepresenting what she's authorized to do, why would she need permission just to talk to them? Granted, I wouldn't think most MCs would want to talk to someone not on the board, since they can't make any decisions, but you never know.

Thanks for your reply and happy hunting to you, Leila.

If I were you, though, I would want a little written memo from the Board approving your exploration of this topic.

Often Selection Committees are executive committees of boards in these types of searches. I really can't say I've heard of a committee of one, and we also know that boards, not presidents appoint committees. I might sound overly cautious, but sometimes that's a good thing.

I see i'm being very picky on this general topic today. Boards should make decisions at meetings so they can be entered in the minutes. This protects the Board from accusations that some rogue Owner is running around interviewing MCs.

Presidents don't authorize such an exploration, boards do.

Please reread Leila's recent replies, Richard.