Remote property management

We spend about $27,000 per year for property management for our association of 274 single family homes. Our property manager does the accounting, collects the dues, pay the bills, does a couple site visits to look at homeowner property condition each year, and also handles homeowner communication. Pretty much everything else we handle.

All of these tasks, except for the couple of site visits, could be handled remotely by someone in a different part of the country.

I just sent out an inquiry to a property management company that advertises remote HOA management.

Wondering if anyone else has explored using non-local property management companies, and what the experience is. Is there decent cost savings that might be realized by using a different property manager?

Does your state require property managers to be licensed? If so, your out of state manager may not be able to practice. Is there anything in the governing documents or state laws that would require your managing agent to be in the same state?

You will want to ensure you have sufficient board or committee volunteers to handle compliance inspections, meeting vendors, responding to emergencies, etc.

There are managers who think you can do the job from behind a desk, and those who think you can't manage a property without spending time on it. I'm the latter camp, personally, but I think there's a difference between management and admin tasks and what you're talking about sounds more like admin tasks.

Issues with non-local management:

* Who is responsible for maintaining the association's records? If you have delegated that to the PM (and many communities with full-service PMs do so), then you will have to make arrangements for that to be done locally. This will include records retention, physical security, and providing access to owners who request it.

* Community walk-throughs and other day-to-day, hands on duties are out. This will include managing your community's contractors. These duties will have to be picked up by the board, and will have to be handled during normal business hours.

* Emergency response is more difficult at a distance, for no other reason than the PM won't know what's going on.

My advice: think twice about this. There are definitely jobs that can be handled remotely, but others can't - which means in practice that the board will need to absorb some of the PM's normal duties. Does the board have the time (and willingness) to do this?

Final thought (my brain is on the slow train today):

Think about what you hope to gain by moving to remote property management. Are there advantages to doing this that you can't obtain locally? If there are, do these advantages outweigh the potential disadvantages? Can you accomplish the same goals by staying local?

As I see it, the main disadvantages to going remote are the added complications of managing your money manager when they're not close. You can partially offset the risks by having enough employee dishonesty insurance coverage, but you're better off not needing to use this insurance at all.

Many corporations have the resources they need to handle remote workers just fine, but most HOAs don't have those resources available - everything falls onto volunteer board members who may not have the time or skills needed. HOAs also typically run lean and mean, and may not have the same ability to recover if things go sideways.

Thanks all.

I received some semblence of a proposal, less cost, of how much we'd pay for a remote property manager. in the proposal was a list of tasks that we would have to start doing on our own.

Big item - community walkthroughs and property inspection. This is a huge reason that our HOA exists, in that everyone does a nicer job of keeping their property looking nice when they know someone will drive by periodically to check on it. Plus if they don't, they get reminder letters to make their place look a bit nicer.

If we look at why we exist as an HOA, this is probably the #1 reason.

Since a remote property manager can't do this task, and since we don't want to start doing this task, we cannot go with a remote property manager.

Sure. The remote property management company we talked to does NOT do the following services:

*Respond to homeowner requests for maintenance, violations, architectural changes
Manage vendors
Coordinate repairs, negotiate contracts, review bids, etc.
*Run board and homeowner business meetings
*Property walkthroughs / inspections
*Complete Secretary of State forms each year

The ones with an asterisk are ones that we do not currently do, and do not have interest in doing ourselves.

I agree that most of these tasks can and, in most cases should, be handled remotely - especially in the days of effective remote meetings. Even property walkthroughs and inspections can be streamlined. In our community, we've put together some software systems to document code violations, automatically create and send violation notices, and store all of the records. Now, all the inspection process entails is snapping a picture documenting the violation on a smartphone, which can be done by board members, homeowners, or can easily be hired out if we decide not to manage it ourselves. The property manager just reviews and approves the violations and follows up on issues of non-compliance.

We need to define what we mean by "remote". Is it simply off-site, or is it in a different part of the country (as the OP mentioned in his first post)?

I agree that things like accounting don't need to be performed in the community, and can actually be done anywhere you have an internet connection. On a beach in the Caribbean with a suitable beverage at your side, even.

But distance introduces risks that don't occur with local operations (I define "local" as a location where you'd schedule an in-person meeting).

To make going remote a smart decision, the remote operation needs to provide enough advantages to overcome its disadvantages and the advantages should be ones that you can't obtain locally (and I can't think of what those could be unless your association is located in the hinterlands somewhere). If you only look at the costs involved, you're missing a good chunk of the analysis you should do.