Are you ready to start a business in an exciting industry? If yes, then being a homeowner association manager is the perfect place for you to start. By starting your own HOA property management company, you can help a community thrive beyond its imagination while earning a comfortable lifestyle for yourself as well.

It doesn\’t matter whether or not you have experience running a business. Your knowledge of managing homeowner\’s associations will take you a long way in this field. Here\’s how you can start and manage your own HOA property management company:

Understand the HOA Industry and the Rules in Your Location

First and foremost, do your due diligence and ensure you understand how local homeowners’ associations operate in your area. Even if you are well-versed in it, it will benefit you to analyze your local area again and refresh your knowledge about the industry as well.

As you begin learning more about the HOAs in your local area, try to narrow down the needs and requirements of these associations. This will help you understand how you can fill a gap and address the needs of local HOAs. 

These include:

●     Community maintenance

●     Collecting resident fees and bill payments

●     Managing finances of the HOA association

●     Processing resident work orders or support requests.

●     Creating a channel of communication between the association and its residents.

Furthermore, it is important to have an in-depth knowledge of the local laws and rules governing the communities. At this stage of your research, you must also narrow down the type of associations you\’d like to serve. These could be anything between the range of gated communities to high-rise buildings.

Type of Communities

○ Single-family HOA – Single-family homes are a type of detached family homes and hence, their most important needs are processing HOA fees, keeping residents informed, and keeping track of violations.

○ Gated communities – These communities follow strict regulations to control the pedestrian flow and are characterized by closed walls and perimeters. Their needs include security, package tracking, and vehicle tracking.

○ Luxury condos and High Rise Buildings – These are buildings with multiple units that may or may not be owned by different individuals. Their requirements include managing amenities operations and reservations.

○ Other types of communities you may be in the best position to manage include active adult communities, golf communities, or townhomes.

Size of the Community

Next up, you must decide what community sizes you can manage. This will depend upon the services you\’re offering and your workforce. If this is your first time stepping foot into the HOA industry, then it\’s best to start slow and pick up a smaller community to work with.

This will help you to understand what a community demands and how you can improve your working efficiency as well. Once you\’ve got a hold of your chosen community, you can move on to the next steps.

Differentiate Yourself

A great way to succeed in your HOA community is to figure out who your competitors are and decide what your ultimate selling point is. This will help you stand apart from the crowd and cater to your target audience better. Here are some of the ways you can make your mark in the industry:

• Service Offering – Define the types of services and the range of services you are ready to provide as a full-time management service.  This can include communication, accounting, planning, budgeting, on-site management, and serving as a direct contact for residents.
• What Sets You Apart – Identify the areas where your competitors are lacking and try incorporating them into your management company. For instance, if your competitor doesn\’t provide legal planning to the association, then you can go ahead and incorporate it into your plan.
• Personalized Customer Service – Due to the advancements in technology, the expectations of people have increased by leaps and bounds. Therefore, people nowadays love to have detailed and personalized customer service. You can provide fast responses to your customers and be on top of resident complaints.
• Expertise – Set an example of professionalism and expertise in your company by truly putting the needs of the community association and the residents ahead of your own.
• Staff professionalism and expertise – Will you require staff to have a professional certification in community association management? It\’s important to encourage staff members to get accredited through local trade organizations or the Community Association Institute (CAI). CAI offers professional certifications and courses to help managers stay updated in the field.

Company Name and Branding

Once you\’re done with the above principles of starting a company, you need to hit the accelerator on your company’s branding. Ensure that the name you choose has a click to it and can make a connection with your potential customers. Remember that your brand name must be easy to remember and identifiable.

Create Your Website

Your HOA management company should have a website of its own to reach out to your target audience on a larger scale and find more leads for your business.

Optimizing your website as per the latest search engine trends will help your target audience to find you easily on the internet and give you an edge over your competitors. Furthermore, it is also important to include a section on the website about your contact information.

Leverage Technology

The latest property management software can be your best friend in sailing your way through the HOA industry. An HOA software like Pilera can help you store resident information, keep track of residential requests and maintenance, view important community documents, communicate with the residents, collect dues, and pull up reports.

As your company grows, find software that will accommodate your growth through portfolio management capabilities. This will enable your staff to multitask much better. Furthermore, Pilera makes this digital transition easier for your company by providing special start-up pricing.

Come Up with a Pricing Plan

You need to develop a pricing plan that will include administrative expenses, legal expenses, HR & payroll. Ensure that the pricing is a round-figure monthly fee so that your pricing is easy for customers to understand.

Typically, management companies charge $10-20 per unit per month, according to All HOA Management. Depending on the location and the needs of the community, what you decide to charge HOAs can vary accordingly.

Marketing of Your Business:

Marketing your business will help spark an interest in your company amongst your target audience. Digital marketing tools like social media can play a huge role in expanding your business and your reach. Another important marketing strategy is to be listed on search engines such as Google and Bing or review sites such as Yelp so potential customers can find you.

Conclusion

Even though starting your own HOA property management company might seem like a daunting task at first, developing a plan to help you identify potential customers and your service offerings can help you get off to a good start. 

Leveraging HOA software from the start can help you organize resident requests and communication so you can steadily grow your company.  HOA management platforms such as Pilera can help make things easier for you. So, begin your journey in the HOA industry today with the latest technology right by your side!

A community association manager juggles many responsibilities that work toward the common goal of operating a community that is compliant and enhances resident’s property values.  However, many managers fall short of fulfilling this goal.  This may be due to lack of communication with residents, ineffective processes, resistance to change, or job stress. In this blog post, we emphasize on tips community managers can implement to better optimize processes to overcome these obstacles.  

1) You\’re not communicating with residents

If you’ve not informed residents of the construction work blocking access to their street or of a rule in the governing documents that a resident violated, then your communications plan needs to be amended.  Not communicating about important ongoings in the community can result in an abundance of incoming calls and emails from residents.  Furthermore, this can lead to internal chaos and wasted time.

Positioning for better success:

Communication at the right time with the most effective methods builds a resident’s trust in your team.  Start out by creating a communications plan.  This plan should emphasize what you will convey to residents, when, how frequent, and who is responsible for communicating.  With all the hard work you\’re putting into your plan, don\’t forget to determine how you will measure success. Check out these ten tips to succeed at your community communications.          

2) You\’re implementing antiquated processes

Are you using outdated processes to manage your communities that create more work than it reduces?  If yes, then it’s important to replace those internal processes and systems with more efficient counterparts.  If your residents are constantly calling in to ask repetitive questions or your staff is rummaging through paperwork to find a completed work order from last quarter, that takes out time in your day that could otherwise be utilized to work on projects that are more critical in nature.

Positioning for better success:

The best way to implement modern processes and technology is to keep yourself updated on industry trends and software.  Trade association websites such as Community Association Institute, ECHO-CA.org, and many others deliver a great variety of industry insight.  You will find topics pertaining to insurance, legal, ethics, maintenance, resident engagement, vendor management, amenities, and more. Then, identify any bottlenecks in your current processes and gradually work to streamline them better.  To accommodate your new modern processes, look for technology systems that work FOR your process – not create extra work. Specifically, a software system that can scale to your needs, releases new features regularly, offers flexibility, customization, security, and provides proactive customer support, will help you to achieve your goals.

3) Low resident satisfaction

Residents may not be involved in their community (or have feelings of apathy), and one of the reasons may be that their expectations are not met.  That being said, it\’s not feasible to meet each resident’s expectations within the community\’s budget and operational constraints.  However, building awareness and consideration for them will make a big difference.  Then, you can implement the most desired and cost-effective ideas.  Adapting to change effectively – whether it is new internal processes that benefit residents or new amenities or cost-cutting where possible – is an opportunity to build a better sense of community, increase property values, and maintain a competitive advantage.   

Positioning for better success:

The key to staying ahead in the midst of changing expectations is knowing your community.  Keep yourself abreast of new trends in residential living, send a survey to your residents to better understand their needs, and identify ways to increase resident retention and satisfaction without breaking the bank.  When residents search for a new home or condominium unit, they are also looking for an enriching experience that gives them a sense of community.  Residents should have access to a central location for all important community information. Be sure to stay in touch with them on a regular basis.  Investing in amenities that your community wants is another great way to adapt to resident needs. As per a recent study by Robert Charles Lesser & Co, communities immersed with greenery and that provided walking/jogging/running tracks, were the most preferred.  Additionally, experts suggest that personalizing amenities to the heartbeat of the community appeal most to prospective buyers.

4) Job burnout

As a community association manager, you are constantly on your toes and wearing a lot of hats.  Understandably, not every hat you wear will bring excitement as you work through your day. Handling resident complaints about the excessive noise next door or reconciling bank statements may just fall into the category of redundant and unexciting, but a necessity of your job.  The high demands of the job or engaging in repetitive actions may result in burnout and feeling stressed.

Positioning for better success

Before you begin your day sending emails, take a good five or ten minutes to organize your day.  What pending tasks do you need to complete? What else do you hope to accomplish today? Creating a list will help you to understand what you’ll expect to do today.  Are many of the tasks you perform redundant? If your answer is a yes, then take some time during the day to identify the areas that are consuming most of your time. It’s completely okay to take a bit of time during your day to identify the sluggish aspects of a process because it will reap much more benefits in the future when you come up with a more efficient process.

About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management suite that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations.  May we help your community achieve these success stories?  Book a demo to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company. 

Residential community clients may oftentimes be unhappy with community ongoings or the level of customer service they received, and will take that dissatisfaction to an online platform.  With the rise of digital platforms from social media to review sites where people receive up to the minute information and interact, the impact of a negative review is amplified. Thus, developing a plan to proactively mitigate negative comments shows proactiveness, openness to consider feedback, and make positive change.  This surely goes a long way in ensuring happy clients and establishing relationships with new community prospects.  In this blog post, we’ll navigate through five important tips to effectively improve online reputation.

1) Know what your clients are saying about your company

Constantly monitoring what your clients (residents and board members) are saying online about you is the foremost important step to improving your management company’s online reputation.  First, assign someone in the management company to lead this new effort. They’ll need to take stock of the platforms your clients use for sharing complaints. These platforms may include review sites such as Yelp, search engine reviews such as Google, or social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.  Here’s how your company can stay on top of online monitoring efforts:

• Setup Google Alerts – Enter the name of your company and/or relevant keywords.  Google will then send daily emails of articles/mentions you specified straight to your inbox.  Check Google’s help article to learn more about how to set these alerts.
• Check mentions on social media regularly.  These include direct replies to your posts and indirect mentions of your company.
• According to Forbes, 91% of individuals use a search engine to learn more about a company before they buy from them.  Thus, it\’s important to research search engines to see what is being said about your company.  Simply type your company name and navigate to the News tab to see what is being said about your company.
• Don’t rule out personal communication.  When residents walk into the office or they send an email, ask them if they are happy with the services they’re receiving?  This is a great way to better understand how residents feel about your services and if they are likely to share their complaints on social media.

2) Remain a calm stance in your response (and don\’t engage in online arguments)

Words used in reviews are oftentimes rude and one’s natural tendency might be to defend their stance. However if not handled appropriately, the online encounter can quickly escalate into an argument, resulting in the risk of legal tussles and worsened reputation. It’s absolutely essential that the employee responding remains calm while being clear and assertive in their response. Here are a few tips to respond to negative comments:

• Respond to the issue quickly, preferably within a few days.
• Be sympathetic in your response to the residents and show you understand their concern.
• Let them know you are looking into the issue. Continue the discussion offline via phone or email.
• Once the issue has been resolved, respond within the same review with a short description of the resolution and thank them for their patience.

3) Don\’t simply use \”copy-paste\” responses

It’s important to make your responses to comments thoughtful and personalized so that residents will appreciate that you took the time and valued their opinion. If you notice a pattern in your response that includes repeated text, build a template with that content in it so you can reuse it. Make sure to leave enough room to address the problem stated in the review.

4) Generate more positive reviews on the platforms that matter

A library of testimonials on different platforms helps spread word of mouth the quality of services you deliver and can become a great form of social proof for your business. The question is, how do you generate positive reviews for the hard work your client services team puts in?

• Conduct a survey regularly requesting resident feedback and if they are willing to post their feedback on a review platform. Or, provide a link to this survey in every customer support email.
• If you can fit in reputation management software in your budget, it can help you to monitor reviews on multiple platforms and separate the negative reviews from positive ones before they go live on public platforms.

5) Continue your efforts in creating a stellar customer service (take feedback in your stride)

The best way to invest in the welfare of your company’s reputation, in the long run, is to continue delivering excellent customer service to your residents.  This effort improves resident satisfaction (and with it, generate more positive reviews), boosts client retention efforts (communities will stay with you longer), and better operations (less chaos in the office dealing with issues).  With these long-term benefits in mind, how can you support ongoing customer service?

• Engage in transparent communications with your residents and keep them informed.  Miscommunication or lack of it can result in resident dissatisfaction. Know the best ways to reach them – through emails, phone calls, text message, newsletters, direct mailers/letters, and/or website updates.
• Provide an easy way for residents to connect with you and retrieve information.  Community management software such as Pilera’s allows residents to log into a website or web portal to see their financial balance, update information, submit work orders, and retrieve all latest community information.
• Take any feedback you receive from clients, whether positive or negative, in your stride and consider it for future improvements.

An investment in reputation management is an investment in your community management company\’s success in retaining satisfied communities and establishing new relationships.  Identifying online platforms where your customers interact is important in understanding what they say about your company and level of services you provide.  Then, you can develop a strategy to effectively handle any complaints, respond with transparency, and incorporate feedback into customer service and operational improvements.