New Year, New HOA Resolutions!
Kickstart the year with new goals and planning for a successful community management.
Shareholder | Litigation Department, Co-Chair
At our annual firm Legal Symposium, I was asked by a board member “what they could do differently in 2025 to make their life as a board member just a little easier?” So, I decided to place the answer to her question in the form of New Year’s resolutions. Get started early in the year with these Resolutions and hopefully 2025 will be a better year for both you and your association.
Resolution #1:
Prepare a calendar of milestone events and review at each meeting. Calendar reviews and action items lists (discussed below) should be placeholders on your monthly agenda. Some important dates to calendar would be:
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- board meeting dates
- annual meeting date
- contract renewal and expiration dates
- reserve study or reserve update due dates
- audit due date
- insurance policy renewal dates
- deadline for approving the annual budget
- due date for the publication of the annual disclosure to the owners and dates to meet with the association’s service providers for their annual checkup.
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Resolution #2:
Meet with the association’s vendors throughout the year. For example, the board should consider meeting with the reserve study analyst to review the reserve study, with the CPA to review the audit, and the insurance professional to review insurance coverage. Meeting with all the association’s vendors helps address any concerns the may board have with those service providers. It also helps build a good working relationship and keeps the board’s expectations at the forefront.
Resolution #3:
All board members should educate themselves in order to identify matters that need to be addressed. Our firm’s core mission has been focused on educating managers and board members to help increase their awareness of issues that may arise from association operations whether they be legal issues or managerial issues. Spotting issues does not mean a board member or manager should become the association’s lawyer. It is risk management.
Consider encouraging board members to increasing their education by attending industry trade seminars, reviewing publications available from CAI and CACM or attending one of our firm’s board boot camps or other educational programs we offer which are listed on our website’s events page.
Resolution #4:
Address matters timely. Unresolved issues involving owners and vendors are not like fine wine, they do not get better over time. Time and again our attorneys see owner’s problems escalate when decisions are delayed or there is poor or no communication between the parties.
Resolution #5:
A key to addressing issues timely is simply remembering what the issues are and who is going to be assigned to handle each. To prevent issues from falling through the cracks the board should consider developing an on-going “action list.” At the beginning of each meeting review last month’s action list and at the end of each meeting go over the action list to identify issues to be added. We think you will find marking an action as “completed” to be rewarding as we do.