Eddducating Community on WHERE they live.....

We live in a 151 single family home/condo environment neighborhood. Meaning: liability and maintenance is ours for our limited common elements. Limited common elements are clearly defined in our bylaws, drawing included. The limited common elements go from the entrance of detached garages to the property line in the yards, including your house, up too the common area sidewalks in front of every home.

I want to find a way to educate every homeowner on this. Short of getting a loud speaker and playing a message over and over and over and over.....Ok I'll stop......I would like to handle this more professionally.

Homeowners do not get that here, they should as they got the same paperwork at closing that I did. I am continuously yelled at for things that do not get done by the BOD when it comes to limited common grounds. The only responsibility the BOD have for limited common grounds is to provide lawn care services, including PREVENTABLE weed control, fertilizer and aeration.

I have been yelled at for not sealing someone's private drive. Not replacing the shingles on someones home that flew off. Not fixing a water leak coming from under someones home. Not picking up the garbage at the park and the list goes on...........

To stop the list, I would like to educate people on WHERE they live. I thought about a mailing, but we just did that with revised guidelines only to hear from most residents they did not read them.......they "filed" them. We do not have a huge turn out at annual meetings, so need to think outside the box.

Quite a smart group here and I encourage your input. Quickly though please, because I get yelled at one more time because a homeowner does not know what any responsible person who invests into a home should know, I am getting the blow horn and walking the community............JK

Tamara - I feel your pain ;)

I'm the President of an HOA of fee simple attached Villas. The governing docs do attempt to differentiate what the HOA is responsible for and what individual homeowners are responsible for, BUT they are lengthy, not always consistent in verbage, and flat-out ambiguous in some areas.

This is coupled with the fact that the builder's sales agents didn't really understand what the docs said, and they really "oversold" to all home buyers what the HOA would maintain.

As a consequence, after the developer turnover, the Board was faced with owners that had greater HOA maintenance expectations than what either the docs provided for or what the current HOA dues would support.

So that's the background with our situation.

Now, here's how we typcally handle HOA communications:

We usually use a "tiered" approach which is designed to be increasingly "invasive" as the importance increases.

1). First tier is both a website news article (about 80+% of owners have web access) plus an article in a printed newsletter that is distributed to those without web access.
2). Mass email distribution (+ printed letters for owners without email) is the next tier.
3). Printed materials either hand delivered or mailed is the highest tier.

In the case of resolving our HOA maintenance expectations we used both #1 and #2. We're pretty careful about using anything above #1, so as to "reserve" those steps for the truly important items.

The content of our News Article can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/3hbuc8

The mass email contained essentially the same information.

We had a few questions, but this seemed to put the issue to rest for the vast majority of our owners.

TamaraW - If the shingles blew off, and there was a roof leak for a condominium unit the responsibility to fix would be that of the Condo Association, minus any deductibles, etc. Of course that is subject to what is described as a common element in your governing documents. Please explain in more detail the type of houses/units these are.

JohnK3 -

What you describe is exactly why we choose to "Tier" our proactive communications. The more frequent and/or numerous the communications, we suspect it has a "numbing" effect on the recipients. So we try to use the website news articles (by the way - owners can choose to have the website notify them via email of each new article posting - or not, so HOA news junkies can get all the info they want) for less critical or routine, repetitive info distribution and reserve email/printed distribution for the more important, more timely needs.

It seems to work, since what often gets ignored on website news articles, gets greater numbers of responses from the email route.

They are single family homes in a condo environment. They are not connected to each other, just like a regular house.

Declarations State - Limited common elements: Except as hereinafter provided and as provided in section 4 of this Article IX, the association shall have no obligation to maintain, repair or replace, or bear the cost of maintaining, repairing or replacing limited common elements or components thereof, provided that the association shall, as a common expense, mow and fertilize grassy areas that are part of the limited common elements that are not enclosed or partially enclosed by fences, walls, shrubs and like barriers or that are determined by the Board, in it's sole discretion, not to be performed at association expense. (wow that was one sentence) Each homeowner shall repair and maintain all improvements a part of the homeowners appurtenant limited common elements and pay the cost thereof. Generally, each homeowner shall be responsible for, including but not limited to, watering of lawns and landscaping, mulching, tree and shrub trimming, and their maintenance and replacement, flower bed maintenance, and the maintenance and repair of patios, porches and driveway and parking areas.

HOMES: because of the unique character of the Community, in that it contains free standing individual single family residential buildings and garages, and thus only a single home per residential building and garage, the risk of loss as a result of damage or because of wear and tear to a home shall be the homeowners, and, accordingly, the cost of maintaining, repairing and replacing of all portions of a home shall be borne by the owner or owners of the home, except to the extent that repairs and maintenance of utility lines .............blah blah - not relevant to the conversation - but this does fall on the homeowner to take care of through the utility company.

IF THE REPAIRS (I AM DONE TYPING LONG LEGAL SENTENCES, YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO TAKE MY WORD FOR IT) ARE NOT MADE IN REASONABLE TIME THE BOD HAS THE RIGHT OF ENTRY TO THE LIMITED COMMON SPACE TO MAKE THE REPAIRS AND CHARGE THE HOMEOWNER.

JohnK3 -

Your more detailed description of your communications provides much clearer perspective for me AND it certainly seems reasonable to me.

As a contrast, we typically have 2-5 new News Articles on our community website each week (some are HOA related and others are general interest in our locality, etc.)

So my answer to the owners who ask the Prez about whether "all this is needed or not", is if you're not interested, don't read it. But if you are, wouldn't you rather have access to it than not?

You can lead a horse to water, but .. .. ..

Tamara,

You certainly must remember the horse to the trough story. Quit beating yourself up over the apathy of these people. You will never beat this by yourself.

Our famous court case--The Judge asked one of the defendants IF he had read the covenants which clearly stated about the pickup trucks. The guy answered "YES BUT I CROSSED IT OUT WHEN I SIGNED THE RECEIPT"

Anyone got a comeback for that one?

My kneejerk reaction to most CCRs and bylaws is:
The sentences are too long and complex.
There's no humor in the document.

So . . . send out ANOTHER flyer (I know you don't want to hear that) and use
SHORT sentences and lots of pictures, jokes and humor surrounding your "rules." People just don't read anymore - you know that!! How about setting some of the rules to rap or a country western parody? ANY way to get your information across. Set up a Kid's Council and have them "translate" the CCRs into more understandable language.

Another idea is to "diffuse" the rumor/problem attact by getting volunteers to "field" the front lines for complaints and silly problems. Kind of like Problem Solvers. Hopefully they can stop the 80% of the problems and the Board can then deal with the other more serious, valid 20%.

Tamara, I put together a document outlining just who was responsible for what and had it vetted by the attorney for accuracy and sent it out in a newsletter. No there is no surefire way to make people read or comprehend their documents; everyday on all the TV channels here there is a crawler counting down to the termination of analog TV and the conversion to digital and what they need to do to keep receiving a picture. Yet I'll be willing to wager that there will still be people confused as to why their TV's have ceased to receive a picture after midnight on February 17, 2009.

Thanks everyone for their wonderful input! I will draw from your ideas, present them to the Board and see what system we can put in play. Then hopefully within time we will be able to get homeowners to better understand where they live which can only improve our overall neighborhood!

YOU ALL ROCK!