Do it ya damm self!

Well, here's the latest saga in the madhouse I call my HOA.

We have two newsletters - one for people who rent their units and the other for homeowners. We used to combine the two, but realized some of the information was really suited for homeowners only, such as the financial reports. So, last year, we decided to create a quarterly for the tenants.

To make this work, we have to create two distribution lists - actually three because we have a lot of off site owners and those have to be mailed. We've tried encouraging people to provide emails so we can save money on printing and postage, but the results have been extremely dismal.

As I review the distribution list to send the last issue of 2009 to everyone, it's just occured to me - why are we doing the work that the off-site owners should be doing? If these guys and gals owned an apartment building, they'd have someone stick newsletters, flyers or whatever in the mailboxes or in the door, but in this case, the off-site people appear to be getting these services for practicallly nothing (they pay the maintenance fee, charge a bundle to rent the place out and collect profits a plenty).

This is supposed to be a homeowners association and while I'm all for making the tenants feel welcome (who knows, some may want to buy their unit someday), we've having assorted financial problems and rather than dump the quarterly, I'd just as soon send a copy to the homeowners and let them worry about getting the thing to THEIR tenants. Happily, one such homeowner has agreed to do just that - if they all went ahead and emailed or mailed the thing themselves, we'd save printing and postage that way.

So, I ask the same question I did in my "survey sez" thread from last week - am I being entirely too picky?

Shelia.
I meant to add that your excursion into the profits these homeowners make renting property is not fodder for this cannon. It is irrelevant and to mesh the two subjects together is going to do more harm than good. In a condo, you can have a little control over this situation in that the Board directs the management, be they manager or MC, and can restrict the incidental services that always come up when you have absentee homeowners or renters. Many owners renting do so with a contract to a rental company, the company should provide the little services such as providing keys, welcoming or instructing guests of the rules and regulations and the Board should ALWAYS demand that any rental issues be handled by the owner. I agree all owners should be civil and respectful to all tenants living in the association and if they desire to include them in any private social gathering that is nothing more than inviting a guest. They would not be welcome at a homeowners meeting, but some have posted here that they allow renters to attend Board meetings. I personally would rather the Board establish a Board member to serve as liaison for any renter issue and all matters of this kind be resolved by the Board and rules and regs established.

Shelia,
Probably your next step may be to try and cost account how much time is spent by management on renters problems. We had a board that tried this, don't work because NO monies should be spent in support of a private business (In my opinion of course) You can't set some dollar amount and say that any money spent over a certain amount will be charged to the individual owner that rents. I have read of condos that charge a sur-tax (if you will) on folks that rent. Good idea until you try and justify what is spent for rental property, then that falls apart because you aren't supposed to spend any money not mandated by your documents. If you change your documents, well, good luck on that, I can just see our owners that rent (maybe 40%) voting to pay more money to the association. However, if the association is new, then that is the time to get this kind of thing in the documents. There has also been proposed here and other sites that the adoption of a rental charge program can be accomplished by education of the owners that rent and try and make them realize, in the long road, too many rental units present the wrong picture of a residential community, especially in condos. All open to opinions.

Sheila to get back to your newsletter dilemma, if your newsletter is normal 8 1/2 x 11 pages stapled together, you could do one newsletter and put what you consider for owners only on the back page or two and just remove those pages when dropping off or mailing to the renters.

Glen, we used to do that, but then there were complaints about the time needed to remove the pages. However, it may be worth trying again.

The real issue behind all of this is keeping up with which townhouse has a renter or not, which is also time consuming. When we get someone to distribute the newsletter, he or she has to stop and check addresses to drop off the right one We had considered not sending anything to the tenants (which may still happen, depending on finances), but I like to do community building whenever possible and think some sort of communication is better than nothing.

Robert I sent you an email yesterday at 2:58PM from [email protected] to the address you posted, i just copied and pasted it into the send to line.
[email protected]

Shelia,

I don't think you are being too picky. What about including two copies of your newsletter and ask the owner to forward one to their tenant?

Having completed distributing these newsletters (just before the first snowfall in Indy), I see that I have a few more comments on this issue - thanks again!

Ellen, this is the approach I think we're heading for - again, I'd hoped to skip the paper (and the costs) and email everything, but as you can see, that didn't happen. Incidentally, I ran into the board member I mentioned in the beginning and he was happy to distribute the tenants newsletter to his people (this board member really isn't so much a problem as the rest of the family when it comes to HOA issues, but that's another, longer and more tragic story)

Robert, the tenant's newsletter was designed to provide information on the community rules and occassional announcements, such as the swimming pool season's start and end dates (tenants had to go to the owner to get a pass). Since the homeowners newsletter is published every two months, we figured a quarterly published every three or four months would save some printing costs, and it has to some extent.

One of our board members pushed to return to the original format, saying it took him nearly three hours to distribute them because he had to check which townhouse had a renter vs an owner/occupant. I agreed it could be cumbersome, but since this would only occur three times a year, I thought it was a small price to pay. (Of course, I now understand what he was talking about because the president couldn't find anyone to pass them out, and I went ahead and did it - here's hoping I don't catch another cold!)

For my part, it's the unwillingness of the landlord/homeowners that irks me the most. I wish we did have more regulations regarding landlord-tenant issues, and our proposed CCR revisions do address some of this (like a rental cap), but as you can imagine, we haven't been able to get it ratified because the homeowner/landlords form a fairly large voting block.

Perhaps if we get rid of the tenants newsletter, these homeowners will be badgered more often for current information on community issues, which may force a lot more of them to pay attention to the newsletter we send them. Maybe a few of them will actually start coming to meetings and hear about the community's problems firsthand, instead of mumbling about "high" maintenance fees.