Is it important for a HOA President to have friends in the community?

After being HOA President for a couple of years, I know a ton of people in our community. I've made it a point to meet everyone at every opportunity.

With all of that, I don't necessarily consider them to be "friends". I'm not a person with a lot of friends and am okay with that.

But sometimes, when the going gets rough, I find it's a bit lonely being at the top.

My perspective is that HOA Presidents with specific circles of friends are a bit problematic. While there is no rule that says a HOA president can't have friends in the community, having circles of friends creates the risk of a two tier system which wouldn't be good.

What's your take on whether the HOA president should or should not have circles of friends in the community in which they reside?

Isn’t this why you have us, Michael?

BillD

They are neighbors.

You have got to be kidding me. Ask your doctor if he can prescribe an anti inflammatory for your swollen ego.

All of my close friends live outside of my community. My neighbors fall under the category of acquaintances - I'm cordial with all of them, but we don't have heart-to-heart conversations. It's both by choice and because I work for the community's builder, so the relationship started out as a professional one and has simply continued in the same vein.

The fact that we're all basically business partners also introduces certain barriers that are absent in strictly personal relationships.

As you noted, being on the board puts certain topics and revelations off limits. It's just the nature of the job.

MichaelT21,
You still have your First Lady, right?

Who answered all of your questions before you joined this site? You must have worn them out.

Just when I thought I heard it all, now this nonsense!

The issue that any board member has to reckon with is this:

A director has the authority to approve fines, send people to collection, and foreclose on them. Your neighbors who are not on the board can't return the favor. This power imbalance will affect your relationships with your neighbors, no way around it. (I suspect it's the source of some of the viciousness you occasionally see in HOA fights.)

This is why I think that maintaining a professional relationship works better.

Yeah, I wondered about that, too. No - not that he "wore them out" - but I remember one of his first questions in here was something like "Can I keep my wife from attending Board meetings?"

Please forgive my digression: from my personal experience, my wife is absolutely "the (wo)man behind the throne". HOA business: it's trivial but also important; the questions and problems that come up are "interesting"{1}; and answers often require 'judgement' - that funny place where experience and opinion and hard facts all have to come together. So natch my wife *hears it all* and knows it all (because I'm not smart enough to see all of the angles, but she'll almost always see something I do not), and you'd better believe her opinions are considered, and I trust her to keep it all quiet. Because that's what spouses *do* for each other.

I believe this is common. I never tell a spouse anything I wouldn't want the other spouse to know.

Are there folks out there who "go it alone" and keep all of the HOA stuff to themselves? If so, that must be rough. I speculate that everyone, married or single or whatever, needs - or could use - an HOA-buddy to help them understand "What the hell is going on here?"

BillD

{1} and (IME, YMMV) "original". I've noticed a handful of common patterns but the vast majority of situations I've encountered here on HOATalk and in real life are original almost to the point of being 'creative' - I've been playing with misc pieces of AI software recently, and they've been doing some *>amazing<* stuff{2} but they're about 50 years from replacing the function of an effective HOA Board.

{2} google on Midjourney.