Considering Self-Management Melissa Musser
October is my favorite month of the year. Autumn is upon us and with it brings foggy mornings, crisp sunny afternoons, football season, changing leaf colors and budget season. Yes, I said budget season. It’s the time of year that I sit down with my clients and discuss their plans for the upcoming year and how to best achieve their goals for their Association. Inevitably, there will be those Board members, when considering cost savings, that will contemplate self-management. The annual management expense an Association pays can be one of its highest.
When considering only the math, eliminating one of the highest expenses and turning those services over to volunteers can seem like a huge cost savings. However, the management of an Association is a lot like an iceberg. You only see a small portion of it at the surface and it’s what’s under the surface that can sink your ship. A volunteer Board should be sure it fully understands its legal requirements and obligations before it makes the decision to go it alone. For the purposes of this article, I am referring to self-management as management by only volunteer homeowners.
In my experience, the decision to terminate professional third-party management and go-it-alone usually comes after some version of one of the following reasons:
• The Association is a very small homeowners’ association of single-family homes with no common areas and an active Board who have the time and willingness to tackle the many required tasks of overseeing their community.
16 Community Associations Journal | October 2017
• The Association has a very efficient, capable manager who makes management of the Association seem effortless thus Board members may think to themselves, “I can do that.”
• The Association has struggled with their manager and finds themselves doing most of the work already. They say to each other, “Other than paying our bills, I don’t really know what our manager does.” Instead of looking for a new management company, the Board wonders if they shouldn’t just do it themselves.
• The Association has certain projects or actions they want to undertake but their management company keeps telling them they aren’t permitted or management makes the process to complete the project seem more complicated and expensive than it needs to be.
I have had the experience of transitioning communities to self- management. I have also had the experience of transitioning some self-managed Associations back to professional management. The one commonality that both situations have are the volunteers. A dedicated, engaged, involved and capable Board of volunteers is an Association’s most valuable asset. They can be the glue that holds the community together and just seem to get things done. With that said, there have been many times when a self-managed Association will contact my company looking for quotes. It is usually because the very active Board members who did the work of managing the Association have left the Board and the new volunteers are amazed at how much work is involved and find it taking over their life.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32