After what seems like a long dry spell, we are getting more traffic from realtors here at my association office. The good news is that our condos are selling again. The bad news is 2 fold - first, the prices are unvelievably low because banks are selling these foreclosed units for peanuts.
What are they thinking??? They wouldn’t work with the homeowners to reduce or fix interest rates and collect the “big” loans, but they will take the property back then dump it onto the market for half or a third of what was owed on it! OK…I won’ rant on that anymore.
Second, we are getting lots of investors which is also, I am afraid, going to hurt us long term. We have been very lucky to be well over 70% owner occupancy in my properties for as long as I have managed them. We haven't had to consider lease limitation restrictions until now and with the new laws going into effect here in California I am not sure it will even help us if we attempted to put such a restriction in place now. My colleague Beth Grimm gives the best overview of the complexties we face today on this issue on her incredibly informative website. This issue is another day's topic and brings with it a whole different set of issues however it is not what I wanted to talk about today.
Today, I want to talk about responding to realtors and the amount of information required on HOA certification forms. The variety of questions seems to be never ending. For over 8 years, we have captured every question ever asked on these HOA cert forms and entered them into our CAM*Pro property management software.
The result is that we have an extensive Property Profile that allows anyone responsible for completing these forms to access vital information at the click of a button. (The benefit of having this kind of report, whether it is generated by a software, a spreadsheet or simply housed in a word document can't be overstated. It allows anyone in the office to step in and quickly see vital, basic information about a managed property.)
The other report we created using the property profile information in CAM*Pro was an HOA certification form. Often, title or escrow companies don’t have a specific form, or it is so blurred and small in the transmission process that we can hardly read it when we do get it.
Most, if not all institutions, will gladly accept our generic HOA certification form in place of a specific banking certification form. Realtors and title agents have given us high marks for having such a form as well as for being able to produce it and send it to them in a timely manner.
On our end, these forms take up inordinate amounts of time and although we do charge for them, it certainly doesn’t offset the burden. Printing our HOA cert report takes just a moment. Adding a couple of items from our financial such as ending reserve amount, current owner occupancy, etc. satisfies most institutions and makes our lives easier.
If you don’t have the benefit of a database program to accomplish this, setting up a word document and printing it in a pdf format can accomplish the same result, save time, and insure consistency in answering the questions on these often dynamic and complicated forms.
Gayle J. Hasley
Community Association Manager
Community Association Homeowner
www.campro.us
gayle@campro.us
