Letterhead and Envelopes sent by Property Manager

Curious about the letterhead and the business name on envelopes sent to homeowners for your associations.

For ours, the return name on envelopes is the name of the property management company. The letterhead on "welcome to the community" letters sent to new residents is that of the property manager. I haven't seen a compliance letter, but assume this is also on property manager letterhead.

Seems to me that these all should reflect the name of the association. Thus, I am floating with our property manager the idea of using HOA-provided letterhead and HOA-provided envelopes for mailing this stuff out (as far as I can tell they do all of their mailings in house), so our name is reflected in the mailings that are sent to homeowners.

Just curious how it works elsewhere.

I feel this is pretty inappropriate. The manager or mc is acting as an agent of the corporation when he/she/they send such letters. The letter should be under the HOA/COA's corporate letterhead, as you suggest.

I agree with Augustine. That being said, as long as it is clear that they are representing the HOA, it does not really matter.

This occurred to me as well. "But" --

-- the opening line of a letter from a competent HOA attorney to a HOA owner is typically, "This law firm represents the ___ Homeowners' Association."

-- A letter from the HOA attorney is supposed to get people's attention, in a way that is intimidating to them.

I suppose as the others say, it is not a big deal for the MC to use its own stationery, as long as the MC is clear about who it represents. Personally I would feel the message was one more layer of bureaucracy between me and the HOA nonprofit corporation of which I am a shareholder. It feels a lot less like my neighborhood and more like a for-profit corporate business.

"Five will get you ten."

I use a printing service, so the envelopes used are of the two window version, meaning the name of the association can always be shown. The letterhead used will depend on whom the letter is being sent on behalf of. If the letter is being sent on behalf of the Board, it will have association letterhead, if from the MC, then we will use our letterhead.

Some MC's will send out mailing in house, which, IMO, is not cost-effective or efficient.

To the comment of being a shareholder, HOA don't depreciate assets or pay dividends. That is a major difference between a HOA and a regular corporation.

Many corporations traded on the stock exchanges pay no dividend. Facebook and Warren Buffet's own Berkshire Hathaway are two leading examples of corporations that do not pay a dividend. Around a fifth of S&P 500 companies pay no dividend.

Much distinguishes for profit and not for profit yada corporations from each other. From time to time the courts and attorneys in HOA cases refer to HOA owners as "shareholders." The legal implications of this reality are significant.

Covenants sometimes require HOAs to pay back to owners excess monies collected at the end of the fiscal year. You won't call this a dividend but some would.

The most interesting part of your post is its evidence that you appear to know little about corporations traded on stock exchanges.

I haven't asked the other board members for opinions on this. I think one of the things we should do at our next board meeting is decide if we want to have our communication committee look at the letters that we send to homeowners to see if they all make sense to all of us, and what changes we might want to see if any. I know that some of our board members were surprised at the wording of compliance letters (as homeowners complained to us about them), so we have sent in inquiries about the language on the letters to the PM company for their input.

I don't feel that I have to make decisions because I am the president. I do make (small) decisions because I am the most active board member. I made (small) decisions as Treasurer and then became the president and continue to make small decisions. Inquiring about whether we can use our own letterhead and envelopes to the PM company is a reasonable thing for me to do, as well as getting cost estimates for how much we might spend on envelopes and letterhead if we go that route. The board as a whole will review the recommendations to see how we want to proceed. If we as a board decide that we don't care, then nothing will change.

I don't e-mail every action that I take a board member to the whole board because I have board members threatening to quit over too many e-mails at the moment. Life goes on though so I have decide little stuff on my own to not overwhelm others time.

https://www.officearticles.com/word/create_a_letterhead_template_in_microsoft_word.htm

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/print-an-envelope-b426d3dd-ab7e-40af-91b5-85158b08ad37

Thank you. I didn't realize I can print envelopes in Microsoft Word nor did I realize I could Word to create letterhead. Now I know, and I can let the PM know that I'll just print my own newsletters and envelopes from here on out, so they don't have to worry about it. Maybe I will start taking up compliance notices and violation letters in the future, too, to save the PM from the hassle of dealing with them.

Any mailing our MC does goes out under our HOA's name with our MC's address as we receive no direct mail. For our Annual Meeting, Proxies are return mailed to our HOA at the same address and the MC tracks them for us.

We frequently get inquiries from our Facebook group wondering how to contact the homeowners association and state they never received the packet from the property manager when they moved in. I know they received it, but likely it was tossed in recycling because nothing on the envelope indicated it was from the homeowners association.

I know it may sound trivial, but the external communications strategy of a corporation is not a trivial matter.

Document design and readability are big deals for professional writers (think tech and business writers). Poorly written stuff probably won't be read - well designed stuff stands a fighting chance of getting people's attention. (Example: the rule of thumb for online things, newsletters, and the like is to put the essential stuff in headlines with eye-catching fonts, and the supporting details in the verbiage below. You generally get about three minutes of people's attention, after that assume you've lost them. So the sender of the communication plus the return address should be front and center.)

Better informed homeowners are more likely to follow the rules, pay their assessments on time, attend meetings, and whatnot. These things can take the burden off of overworked board members and PMs.

So while you can overthink this stuff to some extent, it does matter.

Unless the MC or HOA is using a highly expensive marketing mass mailing technique to grasp attention to their mailings, anything coming from an MC or HOA should appear as important when received.

The "checks in the mail" and "I didn't get it" are well used excuses. If they bought into an HOA it's on the purchaser to wade through their piles of closing papers and received mailings to determine what's important. Too many stand behind the "I didn't know" because they ignore mailings and emails.

Everyday we are bombarded with emails and mailings. I have more of a tendency to open and read the "poorly written stuff" because it may be more important to me than selling me a new phone service.

You can't make people read what you send. What you can do is provide the information they say they didn't get and move forward. No matter how you send it, you can't make them read it.