PM Turnover

We've been with our PMC for 16 years and i think we've had 2 PMs. We're developer controlled so we don't have control over the choice of PMC.

I didn't move into my community until 2001 - at that time, they'd just begun working with our current property management company (after three or four) and the property manager at that time had been with them for a year. Since then, we've had two (including our current property manager), so I don't think we've had a ton of turnover.

That said, I suspect turnover is a problem with some companies. Our property management company was bought out by a nationwide chain (I won't say who, but some of you could probably guess). When I was on the board, our previous property manager (now retired) once said to me she had about 15properties to manage. That's a lot for one person and some communities are more challenging than others (ours certain was!) That could explain the turnover and of course, property management isn't for everyone.

In your case, I think the board should have a sit down with upper management to discuss what's going on. Every time you get a new manager, there's a break in period when he/she gets to know the community and you get to know the manager, and to do that every other year, or twice in a year can cause confusion after a while. That's not good for your community's management.

It might not always be the company - sometimes, a community may have a HOA board that is beyond overbearing and that gets in the way of the manager doing his/her job, and eventually he/she says the hell with this. If your board meets with upper management, you may need to brace yourself for some hard truths about the board, or some of the people in it. How you then fix that problem will be up to you, but you need to do it because you don't want a reputation as being an extremely difficult community to manage.

We've had some minor disagreements with them, though nothing I'd categorize as major and they were able to be resolved (I have no idea what their other properties are like). But I know that we as a Board can sometimes pull in different directions from one another and we don't always have a unified vision for how things should be. Of course, if they think we're too hard to work with, they have the right to not renew the contract when it's up -- there are other PMCs that want our business too, and perhaps a fresh start with one of them is what we need.

The average time for the same manager to provide all serices to an HOA for our management company is 10 years and counting. This can be very important to provide continuity since many Board members only serve a few years.