HOA Website Services

New member here and new HOA and Board Member (6 months old HOA), I am the Board president. The responsibility fo the HOA was transferred to us from the builder last August, they had nothing in place.

We are an HOA with 43 homes. Right now we are hosting all of our documents on a controlled Google Share Drive. I'm fairly computer literate and have self taught coding skills and very good with excel programming.

I've set up two different set of folders, one that is accessible to owners and continues all necessary documents and forms I've created (ACC submissions, violation submissions, etc). Another set of folders only accessible by the Board (3 members) and have developed an excel document that connects to other docs that allows us to bring up all the information associated with each home. Names, emails, dues, fines, ACC applications, etc.

Anyway, I'm doing all this myself and it takes a bit of my time. I didn't mind doing it and it has help us get things setup and established. But I'm looking for an alternative and have been investigating some of the HOA website services.

Anyone have any recommendations or experience with this type of service? I'd like to be able to keep the ability to provide access to documents for both owners and the board, keep automated forms for ACC submissions and ACC approvals, etc. Plus, we need the ability to electronically accept dues and fine payments.

Appreciate any recommendations.

Robert

Your community is small enough that it may not make sense to have a property manager. However, our current management company uses software that also gives access to homeowners where we can do basic things such as view our accounts, make maintenance requests, view documents such as our CC&Rs, board meeting minutes, and the like. So if you look at combined costs (manager plus website) it may make sense even for a smaller community. If not, you can Google "HOA software" to find articles with information about what's available.

Also, there are a number of companies out there that provide HOA websites, and some of them will provide various levels from basic info up through a full service site that even allows users to pay their assessments through the site (I don't recommend allowing payments, actually - it's not needed and can create a significant liability risk for the HOA). You may find something useful in your price range.

I also don't recommend creating a website in house unless you're a large community and you believe you'll have volunteers to take things over when you step down. I've done it in the past, it's fun and satisfying, but it's not sustainable in a small community where we have to twist arms to get people to volunteer for stuff.

For what it's worth, we retired our website. We have 274 homes in our homeowners assocation and had a fancy website full of content that no board member wanted to maintain, so everything was very old and not up to date. It cost about $1500 a year to keep it running so we saved a chunk of change.

For important documents, our property manager runs a basic web portal where provide documents to homeowners. Hardly anybody uses the portal but the documents are there.

I would caution against creating anything complex or expensive because it is likely nobody will follow in your shoes and keep it working after you depart the board.