As a Board Member of your Condo Homeowner’s Association, it’s important to realize that your condo is a unique community of homeowners with much in common and much to gain from the efficient operation of your organization. Hiring a high-quality property management company can go a long way toward enhancing your condo community in a number of areas including communication, transparency and the creation of effective, proactive and proper maintenance activities.

A talented property manager can help your community:

• save money,
• build a world-class board,
• be instrumental in conducting efficient,
• effective board and homeowners association’s meetings,
• satisfy not only on-going day-to-day maintenance requirements but also envision future maintenance needs
• take charge in the running of your overall daily operations.

You want to hire an excellent property manager who is able to effectively oversee daily operations, keep detailed operating records, collect common fees, respond to owner complaints and hire/monitor vendors and service companies for maintaining common areas and amenities.

What You Need To Know

Hiring the right condo property manager can be the best investment an HOA board can make for their community. Making the commitment to hire a particular property management company can be difficult without the sufficient information needed to make an informed decision, so it’s important before you conduct interviews that you have a list of questions written out that you’ll be asking candidates. You should also have an idea of exactly what type of property manager you’re looking to hire.

While you may have a long list of questions you’ll want to ask each of your prospective new property managers, here are a few you should definitely have on the list:

1. As a property manager, how many condo communities do you typically handle at one time, and how often is the manager onsite at each individual property? Does the manager have a working vendor’s and service provider’s list and what does their insurance package include?
2. Can you supply verifiable references for all properties under your management for the past five years?
3. What services are included in your monthly management fees, how much are these fees and what, if any, additional charges may be added to these fees?
4. What options are available for payment of assessments and how are delinquent unit owners handled? Along with this, you’ll want to find out how communication with the residents is handled, what steps you’ve taken at other properties to deal with disputes and if the manager has ever utilized legal services to handle any disputes.
5. In what manner does the HOA receive monthly financial statements and how long after the end of the month will these statements be delivered?

What Else?

There may be literally dozens of other questions you may want to ask prospective property managers during a hiring interview. The actual face-to-face interview should be held at the property manager’s office, providing the opportunity for board members to meet and talk to staff members of the property management company.

Choosing the right property manager will have a serious effect on the well-being of your condo community and the efficiency with which it’s managed. You want to find someone who is adept in handling the collection of payments, who is continually on top of scheduling and overseeing maintenance activities and who is an effective communicator with both the board and with residents.

Do plenty of “comparison shopping” when hiring a property manager. The difference between an effective and an ineffective manager will have a huge impact on the success of your community, so hire a good one!