HOA Board Does Not Allow Direct Access

Why do you desire to bypass a service you pay for to contact an unpaid volunteers directly? Does your HOA board have monthly meetings where you can speak directly with the board?

Far too often owners opt call a board member first and possibly your board has directed the management company to institute this policy.

Michael,
That is a management company issue that the board needs to resolve. Management works for the board and is hired by the board. They should be doing what the board directs them to do. That being said some boards have very little business knowledge and need PM experience. All decisions at the end of the day should be the boards with guidance from management when needed.

Ronald,
If your HOA hired a PMC they have chosen to put a manager in place to handle the day-to-day transactions. That usually means answering questions and collecting dues and paying the bills. IMO the PM should always be the first point of contact and only when needed should the board be contacted directly. The main problem with owners contacting a board member outside of meetings is they get only that board members opinion and if that board member gives bad advice. The owner said the board directed him/her. This is a recipe for trouble. No single board member can or should make decisions for the board with very few exceptions.

I suspect this is the policy so you avoid confusion over who said what to who, one person approving things like exterior changes when those should be going through the entire board for review and so on. Have you also forgotten that board members have lives outside the association and should be able to enjoy them, as opposed to spending nights and weekends handling matters that should be part of what the management company does? That's a big reason why they were hired.

In addition to going to board meetings and talking to these folks directly, I think the board should have an email where homeowners can send questions or concerns about association business - not routine questions about accounts or common area maintenance, which can go to the management company. Emails are sent to the entire board, so you don't get one person acting like the Lone Ranger. I would only respond to emails that are listed on the owner's profile, so you can track where it comes from, as opposed to someone using a fake email to send whatever. If they don't have an email, suggest they set up one as well as a portal on your community website (if you have one)

Hi RonaldC - at my condo building, we encourage all owners to contact the management company first with any questions, concerns, etc.

But we also think it is important for the owners to have a way to contact the trustees directly. For example if they got ignored by the PM, or got a bad answer. (We have had cases of both those things). To achieve this we have created and publicized an email listserve: "trustees@[the name of our condo].com". Messages sent to this email go to all 5 of our trustees. We also caution owners that the list serve is not for emergencies, not continuously monitored, and to expect a response in days (not minutes or hours).

We have had only 3 messages to this email address in the past year. Our pool of owners is very low maintenance. We have many absentee investor owned units. I can imagine that if other condos implemented the same thing, they would get absolutely flooded with messages...

On a tech note, the service we are using for the list serve is called Gaggle Mail: https://gaggle.email/ - I find it easy to use, and affordable.