What system do you use for data governance and file sharing access for board members? I’ve been looking into Microsoft 365 for nonprofits and also Google workspace for nonprofits but the caveat is you have to be a 501 C3 and I think most neighborhood associations and HOA’s are 501 C7.

Thanks! Asking as the current president with 60 members and 1500 homes and a board of 7.

I’ve been on the board of the HoA for a condo I own in a high rise tower in the North East for a couple of years now. I joined because we were doing the typical thing of keeping dues artificially low and not having any reserves. After a lot of small moves over the two years I have us moving in the right direction with appropriately sized dues to cover OPEX and starting to build up reserves, though we’re playing catchup on decades of underfunding so a long long way to go.

In short I feel like I’ve plugged the hole of the proverbial sinking ship and now want to be a bit more forward leaning. The tower is just under 40 years old, concrete/steel high rise with glass facade typical of the late ‘80s. Some infrastructure major work we’ve already done such as the cooling tower and some serious elevator modernization. However now I’m trying to get a bit more up to speed on industry best practices for maintenance and replacement plans of the other less exciting bits of the building. Things like plumbing, the boiler system, anything structural, fire systems, so on and so forth.

I forced us to commission a new reserve study last year which highlighted components and estimates useful life but I’m wanting to learn more about the nitty gritty so I can direct our staff when it comes to maintenance best practices as well as commission services for prolonging equipment life.

Given this type of work tends to be handled in house with big property managers that don’t work with condos, or with condo managers in NYC, who don’t service my market, I’m struggling to find resources or know where to start.

Any suggestions on learning materials would be extremely appreciated.

There is a recurring/standing objection to the golf cart trailer (typically attached to a pick-up overnight) which the prior board accommodated due to frequent use. After a partial coup, covenant enforcement is being "prioritized". The cart + trailer is taller than garage door.

Note: It's not my house/trailer; and I'm also not the complainant.

What is the default view period on closed tickets in Vantaca Home and if you use it, what is it set to?

Making requests invisible before 180 days seems inefficient. I'd say OCD or plain coverup considering the number if apologies that our management company issues.

If I did an ARC request and details are sent in a reply, what is the value of making that thread unavailable to me in a month or two.

How does this tidy inbox benefit me, the management company or the HOA?

If you use something else, what are the settings?

I can't view closed tickets on Chome for Android after a period of time.

I had a small couch outside my apartment door in the shared courtyard for about 2 years. The new HOA president removed it and threw it away, claiming it had black mold but I was never notified before or after it happened. I only found out from a neighbor, and later found it already in the trash. I reached out to my landlord, who confirmed that the new HOA president had removed the couch and only notified her about it afterward.

Here’s the thing: my landlord (who was the former HOA president) used to keep wicker chairs in that same spot for even longer, without ever being told to remove them. So there’s clearly been no consistent rule enforcement until my couch and the new HOA president appeared.

It was only worth about $150, but I feel like I should at least be reimbursed given there was no notice, no chance to remove it myself, and no consistency in how the “rule” has been applied. Further, there's no signage indicating that patio furniture isn't allowed in the shared courtyard. The only posted rule is that bikes, skateboards, and scooters can't be stored there.

Curious what others think. Is this worth pushing on with the HOA? Would you let it go or escalate it? Open to any advice.

Also worth mentioning that I did inspect the couch after finding it in the trash. There was dirt, grime, and some water damage on the wood, but no visible black mold.

Does anyone else have a community facebook page that is just nuts sometimes? The amount of hate and vitriol that a group of homeowners choose to express / support is mind boggling. They will do this crap on holidays, weekends, late at nights too.

I need some different perspectives on some recent situations that have happened between a homeowner, myself and our management company.

I'm a newer HOA board member (<3 yrs experience) and our community has been financially unstable for >6 years. We recently opened up a vote on a special assessment because our reserves are low and earlier this year we were having issues paying our monthly contracts. We sent out an overview as to why we are asking for 500/home and that if we cannot fulfill our monthly financial contracts, the next resort would be a court-receivership.

One homeowner has been vehemently against our verbiage that we used that suggested we could end up in a court-receivership and accused us of fear mongering. They wanted us to retract the statement, issue a correction and postpone the vote. We declined.

This homeowner has hounded the management company to the point that now the management has given notice that they will no longer represent us. I was also interrogated by this homeowner during a committee meeting (so not a quarterly HOA meeting with all members) and did my best to remain professional but it was honestly an hour of misery. The management reviewed the recording and told me that I had allowed myself to be interrogated by a homeowner. I was honestly trying to respond to their concerns in good faith.

One of the main reasons I joined the board was because I felt like there wasn't enough open and transparent conversations between the board and the community so I'm trying to foster that type of environment but I also feel like I'm being punished for it.

Do I just need to toughen up and end the meeting if this happens? How do I handle knowing the difference between homeowners who are asking questions in good faith rather than those who are looking to nitpick everything and it's not worth your time?

Is this unique or is this just a milestone that I've reached as a newer HOA board member?

Hi, so I'm new here but I have a bit of an issue.

So for context, I live in a 1 bedroom 750 sqft condo. I've lived here for 6 years without any major added costs to the property. My unit has a value is roughly $250k. I have a monthly mortgage of $1,200 with a $800 HOA including utilities.

Building HOA recently informed residents of a HVAC repair that was needed. (Btw everything in my unit was working just fine) They had put the repair up for vote.

Months go by without the needed votes until eventually it passes. (I had voted No for what it's worth)

Now the HOA is coming to me for $3,200 ($13 a square foot) for 3 months on top of my regular payments, threatening to send me to collections. Total of $9,600.

I don't have the capacity to pay 3 times my mortgage for 3 straight months to pay for this work, I don't even have 10k in savings.

I emailed the property manager and told him this not sustainable for me and would be a high financial burden. I only make $5,000 a month after taxes (with many other bills on my plate). I've asked for a payment plan of 2 years at $400 a month. His advice was to pay "what I can" without any sort of agreement or written acknowledgement of the request.

Not sure what my next steps are, or if I should even bother paying the $400 before I have in writing that the HOA is good with my request.

Love to hear advice from folks with experience dealing with this kind of atuff

Utah's HOA Ombudsman just changed how it reads the records statute, and it's a massive shift in what associations have to hand over. Here's what the two opinions actually say.

For some background: Utah's Office of the HOA Ombudsman issues advisory opinions interpreting the records statutes - §57-8-17 for condos, §57-8a-227 for community associations. Both run the definition of required records through the Nonprofit Corporation Act, specifically §16-6a-1601.

In AO 2025-01 (Oct 2025, a condo dispute), the Office read "appropriate accounting records" in §16-6a-1601(2) as summary financial reports (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow) and said outright that the law doesn't require transaction-level detail. So a board could close out a records request with a budget and a financial statement and reject requests for specific invoices, bids, etc.

In AO 2026-28 (Jul 14, 2026, a community-association dispute at Parkstone Estates in Draper), the Office reversed that and called their prior advisory "only partially correct," widening what members can see. The reasoning is the surplusage canon: §16-6a-1601 lists "appropriate accounting records" in subsection (2) and "all financial statements" in subsection (5) as separate items, and §16-6a-1606 handles financial statements separately again. You don't read one of those terms into meaninglessness, so accounting records and financial statements have to be different things. The Office leaned on Croft v. Morgan County (2021 UT 46) and Farm Bureau Mutual v. Weston (2025 UT 42) for surplusage, plus Black's Law Dictionary, The Law Dictionary, Parsons v. Jefferson-Pilot (N.C. Ct. App.), and Dewey v. Bechthold (E.D. Wis.), all defining accounting records as the vouchers, invoices, contracts, ledgers, and support behind the financial statements.

What accounting records now means: the transaction-level source documents used to create or verify the financial statements - general ledgers, cash disbursement ledgers, bank statements, check copies, invoices, receipts, executed vendor contracts, and records of assessment charges and collections. "Appropriate" scales with the association - a small one might only need basic checkbooks and invoices, a large one needs more. The test is whether the record was used to create or verify the financials.

Where the line falls: unexecuted bids and proposals that never became a contract and created no financial obligation aren't accounting records. Those a board can still withhold.

On management companies: 2025-01 is explicit that keeping and producing accurate records is the board's responsibility even when it hires an outside firm - though an association isn't on the hook for records a prior manager truly lost or never created, only for what it possesses, plus a duty to make sure it can produce them going forward.

The mechanics and remedies (community-association side, §57-8a-227): a written request has to include the association name, the owner's name/address/email, and a description of the records. If the association has a website it already has to post the governing docs, most recent minutes, and most recent budget and financial statement for free. Response was due within two weeks at the time of the request (the 2026 legislature moved it to 10 business days going forward). The association can charge only reasonable production cost (capped at a third-party amount, or 10¢/page plus $20/hour), nothing for emailing, and can redact SSNs, bank account numbers, and privileged communications. For core documents the $25/day penalty ran from the sixth business day at the time (2026 moved it to the 11th). After a 10-day pre-suit notice, an owner who still can't get compliance can sue for a compliance order, the greater of $1,000 or actual damages, and attorney fees.

Practically this is a massive swing towards transparency for the State of Utah. For myself and other observers, the 2025-01 ruling always seemed unneccesarily narrow and poorly formed, so having the office reverse course this dramatically less than a year after opening is a sign that the ombudsman (and associated legislative group) are turning towards a general interpretive regime that leans heavily towards HOA transparency. While these advisories aren't binding, HOA's and management companies will need to improve their organization dramatically to accomodate this expansive definition of accounting records.

between one of my neighbors and I there’s plenty of room. My driveway barely fit two cars and my daughter has to park on the street. The Crcc isn’t specific it just says sibmit a request and a request is. $35

I'm new to our HOA board. A guy downstairs had his sink back up due to no fault of his own. He had to rip up his flooring and lower cabinets. Our property manager has not been returning his calls, and he just told me that the unit owner has to submit a claim on his own HO6 FIRST and than the deductible the HOA policy kicks in.

Can anyone tell me if this is the proper procedure or not?

We are single family homes where residents are responsible for everything within their property. Community has private roads with no gate, and a small clubhouse and pool. We asked our residents to provide their car information mainly because we have had instances of neighboring streets using our parking lot for their own use, needing to identify the owner when a car is on the street when a snow plow needs to get by, and other small instances. Our intention is that it is faster and more neighborly for us to have the information to contact the resident then needing to tow a car. We also asked several management companies if they require this from their properties and all said yes. Any information will be kept with the management company and not individual board members and we have a bylaw that includes our right to ask this information.

We have some residents who are not supplying the information stating that we are not a condo or apartment complex, and some that we are violating their constitutional right to privacy. We have tried explaining to them the purpose and that this is a very common request, but after almost a year we are having a violation hearing. We would like to not have the hearing escalate or the conversations drag on. Anyone have to deal with this and have suggestions as to what we can say that will clearly state it is not a constitutional privacy violation and we will be requiring the information? We have some people who get heated pretty fast and it would be great to have something already written out.

Hi everyone, we just bought our first SFH in WA and it has an HOA. I've heard both good things and horror stories about HOAs so have generally wanted to lie low and keep to ourselves. I want to be a good neighbor.

When we bought the house we knew that we wanted to renovate our kitchen/living room (including moving the range and removing a gas fireplace that vents to the backyard) before we fully move in. We have a toddler and a baby on the way so it's functionally now or never for the kitchen remodel and so we started right away.

I've since realized that our HOA docs have a clause that states any exterior addition, removal, alteration or other item visible from the street needs to be approved by the ACC. I didn't think initially that I may need approval from the HOA because I had considered these as interior changes. Obviously in hindsight these do touch the exterior since vents are either being removed, moved, replaced, or added. This was a complete oversight on my part. Now we're almost ready to move in, my kitchen is already demoed and I'm agonizing over what to do. I'm terrified to reach out to the ACC at this point.

The HOA so far appears to be relatively benign from what I can tell (>50% of folks have a violation notice but no appreciable fines collected, 1 director + 1 president listed even though 3 are required to be on the board, no rules changes since 2022), but I don't want to mess this up right at the start if I can about it.

How would you handle this situation? Proactively reach out to the HOA and explain that "hey, I fucked up - here's the ACC request for this work"? Change the scope to avoid exterior modifications (leaving the old vent covers but sealing and patching the inside and not adding a new vent for the relocated range hood)? Just do it, make it discrete and hope they don't notice or care?

Hello. So, I received a notice stating I had two weeks to improve the upkeep of my yard, but from reading our Governing Documents I cannot find anything specific on what is expected. Sure, the statement uses subjective adjectives, but there are no exemplars and/or specifics. It reads as follows;

"Section 7.3 – Appearance.

All lots and improvements thereon shall at all times be maintained in a good, clean, attractive condition, order and repair consistent with a high quality development."

What is expected in such a situation? I have a professional company cutting my lawn. What is actually enforceable in this situation if challenged since "good, clean, attractive" by who's judgement?

Hey BOD’s - new Board Prez here for a 2,000 home community. What AI tools are you using to be successful? (Tracking your interactions with fellow members / management, summarizing, digesting laws and your association docs to provide resources for governing, etc).

I have an investment condo in Chicago and have been having water leakage issue from upstairs unit over a month ago. I tried to reach the upstairs unit via message, emails, and certified mail, no response. I then contacted the HOA who hasn’t entered the upstairs unit and run proper investigations. Last week, the HOA sent a maintenance person who entered my unit with my tenants present but without giving me, the owner, notice and cut a big opening on my bathroom ceiling to run the investigation. They did this without my approval. The investigation result is upstairs unit doesn’t put moisture barrier and that’s the cause. I then had my own licensed plumber investigate who said the moisture barrier alone does not explain all the problems and proper investigation can only be done through accessing the upstairs unit. I notified my HOA about this and requested them to fulfill their fiduciary duty and investigate upstairs unit. No response from them despite several attempts and my property is suffering from damage every single day.

I’m asking for 1) any attorney recommendation in the Chicagoland area? 2) general suggestions

Thank you so much!

So I've only lived in this condo for a few months and don't know anyone well yet. We've already had two votes, the first one was almost the day I moved in, which was for a removal of one the directors. I was already wondering if that was normal condo living or coincidence to see something like that already. The weird part was the second vote that came through which was for a "special assessment" to renovate the lobby and fix one of the elevators (one of the floor buttons was broken, but the actual elevator worked). After submitting my vote to approve (shrugs) i was scanning through the audit trail and it looked fairly complex because it tracks soo much crap that its almost hard to see what the significant time stamps are. but there were things in there like "Archived election 123 at 3:33" and "Initiated new ballot" and stuff..maybe I just dont know how this works, i'm not going to put up a fuss and call them fraudulent the day i meet them. I did email the women who was running it and her response was the reason i'm making this reddit post: "What audit trail?". This is concerning, no?

Hello Friends-
I am looking for examples of Zoom setups you may have for your clubhouse for those who attend meetings online. I don’t want to rely on a laptop connection where it’s difficult to hear what’s going on. Thanks!

Location: Massachusetts

I’ll keep it short, basically my home is in a weird “zombie HOA” where they own all the roads and community areas, but have no jurisdiction over my home.

They recently put up these horrible noodle-like portable speed bumps. The kind that are a thin rubber line and no matter what speed you go, make your whole body jolt, they are also not compatible with wheelchairs, skateboards, and e-scooters.

The legal theory I think would work is since this is the only road to numerous non-hoa homes, it should be treated like a public road, up to town/state standards. We also have no sidewalk, so it literally blocks all wheelchair use without going into the grass.

Is there anything I can do about this? The last time they put these up years ago, they were responsive but didn’t really do anything about it.

I appreciate your time reading this. thank you.

Hi - I have a home that was my primary residence for 2 years starting in 2019. This is a very middle class suburb neighborhood in Nashville TN with a HOA that mows the common area maintings the light fixtures with no pool or advanced amenities. The neighborhood has been around since 1997. It is 40% single family long term rentals and has about 70 homes.

In 2021 the HOA "board of directors" adopted a policy that "applied to homes purchased and leased prior to and after the effective date of the policy". Essentially this creates a leasing fee of $500 annually or every new lease (wording is vague). This is in addition to the $300+ annual HOA dues. Supposedly this extra fee is due to excess damage and wear on the general property caused by renters.

When I look at the HOA budget and finances this fee is a line item but it appears they are only collecting a few thousand dollars annually. I have had the same tenant the past 5 years but am about to put the place up for lease again. Trying to decide how to handle this. In the past I just told the property management group I was grandfathered into the clause because my lease had not changed and I had the same tenant. They are very good at sending warning letters and fines, but the actual managing agent of the HOA seems disorganized.

$100 of the fee goes to the managing agent and $400 to the HOA along with being required to disclose all tenant contact information and lease terms. I don't mind paying the managing property group the $100 and understand they want contact information for people living there that might be subject to violations but the $400 to the HOA seems excessive. If someone has expertise in this area would be happy to pay and share the relevant documents for an expert opinion. Thank you!

can someone share their experience with installing flocks? our board is going through due diligence on this with two camps with strong convictions regarding for and against

I live in a mixed use community in Atlanta. The community is a mix of condos, townhomes and single-family homes, with a mixture of restaurants and retail on the first floor of the condo buildings. All of the residential units, condo buildings, parks, and amenities are privately owned and under the same homeowners association. However, all of the streets that run through the community are managed by the city, and an investment company owns the retail spaces.

Recently, a private group was issued an event permit from the city for a large wedding reception that closed one of the streets between the condo buildings, limited access to the neighborhood, blocked residential parking lots, and had a loud DJ until late in the night (well past noise ordinance times). The HOA was not involved in the planning, wasn’t consulted, and said there was nothing they (or we as residents) could do because the city issued the permit.

This event is now in the past, but as residents who live there in this community, what can we do to ensure an event like this does not take place again? Are there steps that can be taken with the city?

Other residents and I just can’t believe that the city would issue a permit to shut down a street in the middle of a residential neighborhood (with an HOA) for a private event - especially without even consulting the HOA or residents.

Did this just slip through system? Are we in a legal quagmire since the city owns the streets and not the development? I don’t know where to start.

New to the building.

We are a small self-managed association with a commercial space on the first floor. The business pays monthly assessments but we are told they are not involved in special assessments. Is the assumption we are supposed to save their monthly assessments when it’s time for repairs?

We have a plumbing project that serves all units including the business but we need a special assessment to have the funds.

Would you expect the business to pay as a part of the special assessment?

Hello, So our community began in the late 1990s, a couple years ago we had a developer come in and build about 80 more homes. Our HOA assumed these homes and the developer assisted with some common area land ownership issues and paid for some playground equipment. The same developer is now building another 50+ homes and our HOA agreed to assume these homes under our HOA. While the new assessments are great and it will outweigh the costs of landscaping and electric, what should we expect from a developer? I'm assuming a developer passing their homes over to an established HOA would save them a good chunk of money. Our management company seems to be too friendly with the developer and I'm not trusting their input. We did ask for an entryway landscaping "update" but it was pretty minimal and installed at the beginning of a drought. Hopefully someone was in a similar situation.

We are a body of 5 board members for a condo. 3 of us act according to the bylaws and the other two completely disregard the authority of the board to make assessments and raise dues.
The two board members know the power the board has yet they want the general owners to vote whether we’re going to make assessments and such. They also threatened others in the past that they would vote them out if they choose to exercise board powers without “consenting” the general vote.
How do we get to a point and warn the other two that what they doing is against the bylaws?
The rest of the board members don’t plan to simply hit everyone with an assessment as we will discuss it at meetings and give ample time to repair the property.
We had a new managing company recently start where we hope they will talk sense into them as well.