Financial Planning and Vendor Management

Hey all,

Managing HOAs is not for the faint of heart sometimes. Recently, on an HOA level, we have had quite a few structural repairs identified for now and in the future, and on a homeowner level, we've had quite a few owners update their interiors from the turnover in 2022/early 2023. This also opens a new question of tracking and approving exterior and interior alterations. I'm sure this is a problem others have had; how have you addressed this?

That said, it seems like a crazy time to find, manage, and approve good vendors. Does anyone else have this problem? If so, what have you done to address it, and what problems have you encountered?

In addition, we hadn't increased assessments for quite some time, but the more I look at our finances and future reserve needs, the more we obviously should have. Looking at the market, it seems like this is an ongoing problem for other HOAs. I've been trying to navigate how to pitch our homeowners on annual assessment increases. I believe this would positively correlate to home appreciation by having a healthy HOA to maintain structural issues or additions.

A lot of the updates we are needing are somewhat blindsiding. Does anyone have good tools for reserve studies or planning future repairs that the board, board, and/or community association can use? How do you manage the HOA finances and future planning? What problems have you run into, and how did you solve them?

I really appreciate any help you can provide. Cheers!

It can be tough.

When my previous Association did it's first reserve study, we had to increase assessments by 20%. This high of an amount required membership approval.

This was accomplished by being transparent with the finances, providing copies of the reserve study, many news letters/flyers on the issue and some door to door.

Concerning approvals, we (past association again) had an issue of lack of paperwork for the tracking.
We corrected this by:
1) Performing an inspection on every property (mind you we were an HOA not a condominium).
2) Identifying changes to the property
3) Verify the change was on file.
4) if there was no paperwork for the change, but the change would likely have been approved, we sent a memo stating this fact and considered an approval.
5) if there was no paperwork for the change, and the change would likely have been disapproved, we sent a letter asking for proof of approval.

We then moved forward from that point in time.
We also did annual inspections to see if changes occurred without approval.

Regarding reserve studies see:

Subject: Reserve Studies/Funds 101 old thread on this forum. Some of the links on this thread no longer work. There is an excellent tool/spreadsheet mentioned near the end of the thread that members here helped beta test. That tool does cost some money.

Reserve Studies Management from CAI (free)

Condo Safety - information and resources for Community Associations from CAI excellent free resources on this page

Additional Resources from a reserve specialist firm (all free)

RESERVE STUDY GUIDELINES for Homeowner Association Budgets Based on CA requirements but excellent info

Hope this helps,

Tim