Ep 90: HOA Industry Trends in 2025

Julie Adamen 0:00
Especially if you have management, if you have professional management, either on site or through a portfolio management type situation, all of that type of correspondence should be going through your management company anyway. They should be your filter. Your manager should be your filter. You’ll get what you need to know. Otherwise. Here, it’s over here, so utilize that tool,

Announcer 0:20
Hoa Insights is brought to you by five companies that care about board members, association, insights and marketplace, association, reserves, community, financials, Hoa invest and Kevin Davis, Insurance Services. You’ll find links to their websites and social media in the show notes.

Robert Nordlund 0:36
Hi, I’m Robert Nordlund of association reserves, and

Julie Adamen 0:39
I’m Julie Adelman of Adam and Inc. And this is HOA Insights, where we promote common sense

Robert Nordlund 0:44
for common areas. Welcome to episode number 90, where we’re again speaking with management consultant and regular co host, Julie Adelman. Today we’re talking about the trends you should expect to see in 2025 trends will help you be prepared for what is about to come. We want to help you be both informed and prepared, which is going to help you have success leading your association into the future, and perhaps give you a little more time to consider how to appropriately respond to these changes. We want your association to thrive, and it starts with leadership at the top, and that’s you. Well, this is a follow up to episode number 89 where we had a great chat with Russell Munz, one of the sponsors of this podcast, and the owner of a financial services company. We spoke on the range of options available to associations in between self management and full management, if you’re struggling with managing the affairs of the association all by yourself, or if at the other end of the scale you have a capable board and full professional management, but you feel squeezed by cost left and right, this episode will provide you some great insights and food for thought about taking advantage of these in between support services. Well, if you missed that episode, take a moment after today’s program to listen from our podcast website, hoe insights.org, or watch on our YouTube channel, where you can give it a LIKE, or better yet, subscribe from any of the major podcast platforms so you don’t miss any future episodes. Well, those of you watching on YouTube can see that I’ve got my favorite HOA insights mug here I got from Oh,

Julie Adamen 2:26
sorry, it’s in the dishwasher. It’s in the afternoon. I’m done drinking coffee by that time, there

Robert Nordlund 2:31
you go. Okay, we learning more about Jubilee and I than you needed to. Sorry, people anyway, you can look for mugs from our HOA insights website, or the link in our show notes, that’s where you find. The merch store. We’ve got some great free stuff, like board member zoom backgrounds, and especially items for sale, like the mugs. So go to the merch store, find the mug you’d like, and if you’re the 10th person to email podcast at reserve study.com with your name and address and mug choice. I’ll send it to you for free. Okay, so we enjoy hearing from you responding to the issues you’re facing at your association. So if you have a hot topic, a crazy story, or a question you’d like us to address, you can contact us at 805-203-3130, or email us again at podcast at reserves id.com this episode is our choice, simply due to time of year. We want to get you thinking about the trends that you need to prepare to face in 2025 So Julie, start us off with your thoughts on how professional management is changing in 2025

Julie Adamen 3:42
well, you mean professional as management companies or

Robert Nordlund 3:45
Yeah, okay, so how they’re treating board members, how they’re working with their board members?

Julie Adamen 3:49
Well, I’ll tell you, I had a really interesting conversation with a the president of a very large management company out in Southern California, okay, and I’m doing a board retreat for them coming up in the beginning of next year. And, you know, they’re talking to me about what they’d like to talk about and what they want me to talk about, and something came up that I hadn’t really heard yet, but it makes sense they were telling me that even in the last four to five years, at the most, just this amount of time, that they are spending a tremendous amount of time bolstering their board members. I mean, really trying to keep their spirits up and giving them as many tools as they possibly can. Because in previous years, I mean, back when I was actually physically managing low these many years ago, it was, you know, you’d have board members that would come on the board, and they’d stay on for two, three, you know, if there were no term limits, four or five, you know different cycles, right? So they could be on the board, term board members? Yes, long term, 10 years, 15 years. Now, there certainly can be downsides to that, but at least staying on for two terms is really great, because the board has some stability, and there’s corporate memory going on, right? In with that? Yep,

Robert Nordlund 5:00
continuity, institutional knowledge. Yes, lots of good things,

Julie Adamen 5:04
exactly, all kinds of it. But now that is just about a thing of the past. They are saying that they are limping people to finish their terms, and as soon as that turns up, boom, they’re gone, or they quit in the middle of their term. And the reason is the homeowners and the residents and their attitude and honestly, how nasty they are. And I thought that actually makes a lot of sense. And so after I got off the phone with him, I made reached out to some other management company folks that I know, and they said absolutely they hadn’t really thought about it that way until I talked to them about it. It’s an ongoing problem now, but I don’t think it’s going to get much better. And just briefly, I think the two main reasons that we don’t need to beat them to death, but this is the way it is right now, and why people are the way they are. I think everyone watching probably agrees. Number one is COVID and that whole thing. Number two is politics, and I mean national and regional politics, people are still so divided. It is just it’s just made people think like they have no boundaries. They don’t really need to not yell at somebody. They feel like they have a right to yell at somebody or get in your face or make threats, and I think we’ve normalized it as a society. I’m forgetting talking about that part. I think that’s the problem. It’s normalized in a lot of places, and thus it bleeds right over into HOA management. Because we really are a microcosm of larger society. Each Hoa is just a microcosm. I can see it, and I don’t think it’s going to go away. It may get better in the next year or two, if the economy gets better, I think that will help some. So I was thinking about how to, you know, give board members tools to bolster their attitudes and to not take things quite so personally. And again, these are the exact same things we used to tell managers. I used to supervise managers, and you would always have to do this with and it’s like, it’s okay, you’re not alone. And for you board members out there, the first thing I want to tell you is you are not alone. You are not in this alone. There are 1000s of board members across the country and across the world going through the same types of things. So how do we get you to know that you’re not alone. Well, the first thing I would suggest is that if you, especially if you’re a president or in leadership role somewhere, and the board is that reach out to other local associations. And I mean, they’re not going to be too difficult to figure out who the board president is. Oftentimes, they’re members of our professional organizations. Cai, national professional organization if you’re in Northern California, I think a lot of our listeners are there. Echo, E, C, H, O, echo.org, I think that’s a huge organization for board members only. But if you can get together with other board members, either at a professional function or even even informally, you know your association holds a little cocktail and cheese kind of party for two others, or vice versa, and you can talk to these board members, see how they’re handling it. I think the worst part is thinking you’re alone. And you know, Robert, from all of the correspondence we’ve gotten and phone calls we’ve gotten from homeowners and board members over the last, you know, year and a half, two years or so, I think, do you not think that the one thing that comes out like they just they they’re all alone, thus they don’t know where to go or what to do? Would you agree with that?

Robert Nordlund 8:31
Yes. And for the listeners who hear Kevin Davis’s voice, he often talks about trying to lower the temperature, because, again, homeowners are getting nastier. They’re getting pickier. They it’s very different. He says they can be much more aggressive when they’re behind a computer screen, rather than what they learned as a kid, being polite, being nice to the people around you, social graces, and when you first said that this was starting maybe four years ago, I go back to that takes us back to 2020, and COVID, and we got defensive. I heard another voice that was talking about how starting with COVID, when the government came in and said, This is what you need to do to stay safe. That made us feel like someone else was protecting us, we perhaps softened our self sustaining skills. And self sustaining skills have to do with working with your neighbors and being polite in comfortable society, social graces, those things like that. And I think when you’re left to your own devices, you lose some of those skills. I was almost alarmed. I got a Christmas card from an old friend, and at my age, he was talking about how he retired two years ago, but he’s. Really going to be retired at the end of the year, because that’s when he’ll finally get off his HOA board, which has been a disaster, and that’s that’s my industry. He He’s hitting the nail on the head. So like Julie said, if you think it’s stressful leading your association, it’s not you. It’s not your problem Association, it’s an industry wide thing that’s going on. We’ve got this community here, the podcast community, to encourage and equip you on a weekly basis. So we’re here. We get it, we hear the words, the voices. But today we want to try to see if we can point you in the right direction, things that you can do. And I’m thinking about, I think it was two years ago when we did some Homer models. We lived in a we rented a condo for a year, and along our road there were three others right next to ours, and it would have been so easy to reach out to those board members and say, Hey, we’re within a half mile of each other, if not a quarter mile of each other. And are you seeing this at your place too? And just have that community where maybe you go out to dinner every other month, maybe you go out to dinner once a quarter, your kids are probably on the same football team. So maybe you go to the high school football game and sit in the same section, whatever it is, but community is a big deal. So Julie, thank you for pointing that out.

Julie Adamen 11:33
Well, I just think it’s something that, you know, the boards don’t, they don’t think about doing that, because it’s just and for you and for me. Robert, I mean, it’s so easy for me to say, Oh, do this, you know, but, but honestly, it’s, I think, for everyone out there, Robert and I, we’re not so close to it that we, you know, we we can see the forest and the trees, but when you’re deep in the trenches like you are, and you’re doing yeoman’s work, you’re trying to do everything correctly, and the people are coming at you from all sides, and you’re just like, oh my god, I just feel alone, but you’re not. And so this communication with other board members is, I think, very, very helpful also. CI, our national professional organization, has chapters all over the country, I mean, and if you’re in a larger state, like California or, you know, here in Arizona, Arizona, we only have one that takes up the two major areas. But, I mean, California, how many you have? Like, six in Southern California alone,

Robert Nordlund 12:28
and there’s five in Florida. Oh, there’s more than that. I think

Julie Adamen 12:31
there’s more, like nine, but okay, but yeah, yeah. So there’s so many Georgia, New York. It doesn’t matter where you are. There is some form of a CI presence somewhere, and you can look it up online at Cai online.org, that’s the that’s the umbrella organization, and it’ll show you where the chapters are. But if you can go to any kind of meetings or luncheons, they may not even exactly be geared toward board members, but board members will be there, and that’s a way to start, you know, shaking hands, introducing yourself, and asking what they’re doing, and just creating that relationship. So there’s also, there’s the personal forum, but there’s also a professional forum for you to, you know, meet other folks who are doing this. Also, back to Cai, I not trying to be a commercial for CI, but it is our major organization. So they do have all kinds of board tools and online courses for board members through their website, and I think, I think most of them are online, as well as in person, especially if you’re near a larger section of the organization. Those things are good tools to get you to understand your job as board member, which always, you know that that platform for performance and what your real duties are is always a great thing to start with, but that emotional side you maybe need to deal with, or, you know, just that, oh my god, I can’t deal with these people anymore. I get it. I totally get it. Is that it’s, it’s to talk to other people who are having the same thing. It’s like, you know, it’s like, if you’re it’s like being an alcoholic. The only person who can talk to you about what it’s really like is another one, you know, or somebody, or anyone who’s had a disabled child, or just go through the litany of human experience, you’re going through something like that. So I think it’s really good to understand that you can connect with other folks. Yeah,

Robert Nordlund 14:16
well, let’s go a little bit further. Talking about the management company, they are probably beginning to be sensitive to this. Are, do they have any tools to help board members, or is that beyond what we should expect of a management company?

Julie Adamen 14:30
Well, you know, I think this is something that’s developing, because this is for them. This is a new experience as well. I mean, I was talking to an executive who’s been in the industry for how long is probably almost as long as I am. Probably not quite that long, maybe 25 years. 2025, years. And then I talked to my buddy, Rolf, and he’s been in it about that long, or no, 30 like me, more like 3035, and so the business is so quick and fast anyway, that I think. It’s something that there everyone’s starting, just starting to recognize this is becoming a problem. And if it would be my recommendation that though it’s probably not a contractual issue for you as management companies, but if you get ahead of this a little bit and give your board some tools, and that can be everything from, you know, operational, you know, guidelines, how to how to help them learn how to do things better, so they feel like they have a basis for operations in their own heads, in within their own boards. But also, if you can have a quarterly all boards meeting like, kind of, it could be a giant therapy session, but it could be yes, have everyone come together and let them chat, and then maybe have a speaker come in and talk about, you know, everyone loves to have the lawyers come in and talk about the new laws that are being written or coming down the pike, whatever it is like this association, I’m their speed. I’m their main speaker to come in and, you know, do give board therapy, but it’s, it’s those type of retreats. But I would say, do them more than once a year if you can. I mean, I would try, even if you have to do smaller things quarterly, and make sure you’re staying in touch as executives, especially, make sure you’re staying in touch number one, with the managers underneath you, but also with those individual board members. Now, obviously, executives don’t have time to talk to every single person, but I think there’s a pretty good way to get a beat on what’s going on through the managers and through the board presidents, which is someone you should have somewhat of a relationship anyway, if you took a survey of then, what do you see as your greatest challenges with your homeowners? Just just three points. What are they? And take that and run with it. And I think you could have other speakers come in. You could just have a wine and cheese party, whatever it is to let these people have some time to vent and give them some more tools and some moral support, yeah,

Robert Nordlund 16:49
yeah, to let them know it’s not them, yeah, it’s not their association. It’s the industry. And here’s some tools we can have so you can blow off some steam, yeah, and make some friends and have that camaraderie and community with what you were saying. I just was thinking I got invited to speak to a bunch of a management company’s board members in February, and I’m thinking, Oh, that’s probably what they’re doing. They’re giving their board members a community forum, bringing in an outside speaker. I don’t know who’s going to speak in January or March or April or May, that kind of stuff, but they’re probably doing those kinds of things. And I I believe we’re probably going to be seeing more of that as the magic companies are trying to, as you say, get ahead of this and realize that for the association to succeed, they need a healthy board. Healthy board needs to be able to sustain their time as a board member. You have a pipeline of board member candidates coming in, which means healthy committee structure, and there’s so many different parts to it. The other parts are successful meetings. So when homeowners do come to the board meetings, they realize, oh, we have a functioning community here, and they see that they could be a part of this. Julie, we’ve talked about those kinds of things before, right? Many times,

Julie Adamen 18:10
many times, I think we just all this is, is just another layer in those layers we’ve talked about with healthy meetings and healthy committees, developing a pipeline, but this is just one more thing where now you’ve thrown in the wild card of it’s there’s always the human wild card. But this is one that’s been born of some external issues that have gone on in our country and indeed the world, but for our purposes and just for the country. And don’t forget everybody, your association is simply a microcosm of what’s going on in the greater world. I mean, there’s just no two ways about it, and you can’t wish it away. You can’t legislate it away. It’s human beings. So what can we do to maybe channel it if we can, or what can we do to make it easier for ourselves as board members to function and get it more? How about this? Less less dysfunctional? Not that you guys are dysfunctional. Maybe you are, but not that. If you guys can as board members, if you can provide any kind of of solid, I could say your solid operating platform. But also that makes the homeowners feel like there’s a solid platform. You know, back to Robert, what’s my favorite subject, regular communication between boards and and the homeowners and so that is that’s always a big problem, and everyone doesn’t have time. But again, like the management companies trying, or hopefully going to try, and get out of front of this issue, because I think we’re already about two years behind, but it takes a while for things to catch up. If you understand this, how can you get in front of this issue, you know, as a board, how are you going to help alleviate some of this? And you can’t fix crazy. You cannot fix crazy, but you can fix to some degree. Describe. Told for no reason. Yeah. And there’s a lot of people that are disgruntled for like, really no reason,

Robert Nordlund 20:03
yeah. Well, Julie, thank you for that. I think it’s good time now to take a break and hear from one of our generous sponsors, after which we’ll be back with more HOA insights, and we’ll talk about what you can do to try to lower the temperature at your association.

Paige Daniels 20:20
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Robert Nordlund 20:51
Now we’re back. Well, Julie, we spoke about kind of the problems out there, but how can we start to move forward and lower the temperatures, smooth things out at the Association. We’re talking about some resources, but what else are the tools that board members can avail themselves of to start making progress? Yeah,

Julie Adamen 21:10
I said, as we said, that Cai has them. They have all kinds of information that is free downloads from for board members. So they have that Cai online.org and I also have some integrated into my website. So if you out there, if you would like to go to my website, admin, inc.com, if you can’t remember that, just google me, and you will find it. Julie Adam and I’m everywhere. So get to my website, click on the Education tab and scroll down to board member education, click through to the educational platform where, yes, we have board member education that as well and their videos. So it’s a terrific thing to do, but also embedded within that are several tools for board members, everything from operational policies to commitment statements to committee guidelines that you can take and use however you wish, and board member job descriptions as well as foundational

Robert Nordlund 22:05
things that will help it be not your problem, but this is who we are as an organization, and

Julie Adamen 22:11
it gives everyone something to hold on to. You know, it’s, oh, this is how this works. Okay, not Well, I don’t know how that works. Let’s try this. And instead of, you know, just kind of willy nilly doing something, these will give you some platforms for performance. You know, the the biggest problem, I think that happens in associations is because we turn over very quickly. You know, board members come and they go, just like we’re talking about, even in good times, but all of a sudden your corporate memory is gone. But when you have those educational and those, sorry, those foundational documents of board, policies, commitment statements to job descriptions, etc, etc. You have that stable platform. The more stable the board is, the more stable the community tends to be. If the board is chaotic and and running around not knowing what they’re doing, or you that kind of thing, then the commit the community looks at you guys and says, well, there don’t even know what they’re doing, even though you may, but what’s coming out to them isn’t. And the next thing, of course, is always, always, always communication, and clear communication. Oh, and this is the one thing I did want to

Robert Nordlund 23:14
talk about, good, good, good. 2025,

Julie Adamen 23:17
2025. Is for those you folks who have been out of the workforce for a little while this this be like, Oh my God, I don’t want to deal with it, but it’s actually incredibly easy get your grandkids or your kids to show you how to do it. But if you want to put out a decent missive or newsletter that goes out to the homeowners, and no one has time to write it, and you certainly that’s not your forte anyway, all you have to do is put together just some bullet points of things you want covered. Plug it into chat, GPT, and you just Google that, and it’ll put it. You can do it for free. Plug it in there and say, make this a 200 word article about what we’re doing. And you put those bullet points in and boom, it’ll pop out in about a minute and read it over make sure it all fits you. But it is an astonishing tool time saving. I use it all the time now for things I that would take me three or four hours to correct and write and go back and do, and it just been amazing. So that is that’s another huge trend in 2025 is the use of AI, and it has grown exponentially in the last six months, and it’s going to go even faster this year. Take advantage of it,

Robert Nordlund 24:26
yeah. Can you also just say, do it again, but a little friendlier. You

Julie Adamen 24:30
can check that once it’s up there and it spits it back out. You just type in there, ooh. Make this sound a little less professional and more friendly, or more professional and less friendly, or whatever it is. And then, if it’s too many words, you say, This is too long. Redo this, but take out 200 words or whatever it will do it. It’s It’s astonishing. And they could just copy and copy it and put it on piece paper, and there you go.

Robert Nordlund 24:54
Fantastic. Well, as I’m listening to I’m hearing you say two things. One is, there’s. Foundation of know who your association is and be able to articulate it. Have that foundation so it’s not just willy nilly, the five crazy board members off on the side who meet in secret, but that’s the whole point. Have the foundation and, number two, communicate what’s going on, because when people don’t know, they have concern. And I think we were living in an environment now when, any time they don’t know, then they are fearful. And that started with COVID. I remember the first couple of weeks, I was thinking, Can I touch the mail? My wife wanted to go out to this and I said, Okay, make sure you wash your hands when you come back. And you know, we thought it was a black death. We were fearful until we realized that level of fear wasn’t justified. So the more you’re communicating, and one way or another, a note on the front door. I went in to do a site inspection, and they had a box of donuts in the lobby saying from your board of directors, happy Tuesday. By the way. Here’s the meeting notes from last month’s meeting. And I was like, nice. They they were doing checking the little boxes. It doesn’t have to be an email blast. It doesn’t have to be a fancy newsletter, but just the more you communicate, there’s going to be an election Tuesday next week. We’re going to have to turn the water off in building number two to fix that long standing problem of the grass outside of that building being soggy, whatever it is or it could be. We are finally going to get pest waste stations installed. Thank you for all your suggestions that will happen the 15th of next month. Whatever it is, communicate. Communicate. It allows you to be a stronger platform, that foundation, and then to fill in the community communication gaps where people may generate their own fear. May they do good point,

Julie Adamen 26:59
you know, a vacuum. You know, nature awards a vacuum, and it’s going to be filled with stuff that’s not pleasant, typically, well, and it and integrating with other board members last one, right? Okay,

Robert Nordlund 27:10
there’s that, because we know inflation is real. It seems like the government is getting that more under control. It seems like the insurance costs are high, and they’ll probably continue to go up. So we know those things, and you have a choice. You can face the problem of not having enough money, or the problem of raising the assessments at your home. And as a board member, I think we’re going to suggest that they the lesser problem is raising the assessments so you have the right amount of money. We talk about the well, the four C’s, they keep growing, but care about your association. Be curious, what do we need? Be courageous, communicate and by golly, if you need more money, if your budget is tight and that’s a source of stress. You need to generate more income. So there’s some things in your control, some things outside your control. Legislation, there’s more around every corner. Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of things swirling around us. So think about what you can do and what you can’t do

Julie Adamen 28:17
and what you have to let go of. But one last thing I wanted to tell for board members out there, there are times it’s okay to say no, and that is typically when people are abusing you via email or on the phone or in person. You do not have to deal with that nor take it. And in fact, associations often send those people a cease and desist if it gets pretty bad, even if it’s not to that level, and you just, and this person is just to bother all the time about that that’s become personal to you, then it’s time for you to just, I’m sorry this is not going to be answered. It’s going to go directly to our management. And especially if you have management, if you have professional management, either on site or through a portfolio management type situation, all of that type of correspondence should be going through your management company anyway. They should be your filter. Your manager should be your filter. You’ll get what you need to know otherwise. Here, it’s over here. So utilize that tool. Just because someone says rabbit doesn’t mean you have to jump at every time you need to manage that. And you’ve if you want to be on the board for a longer term than one term or one year or three months, you have to manage that incoming communication that’s coming to you. You don’t have to absorb it all. You do the best you can with what pertains to you, but that continual bordering on abuse. Just funnel that right off to somebody else, meaning your management staff, manager, management staff. If you don’t have it, you should have a policy on how to deal with that type of thing and publish it to all the members. This is what’s going to happen if you know, we get continual communication that is abusive, blah, blah, blah, that type of thing,

Robert Nordlund 29:58
because we under. And you as board members, are there to help. You’re there to run the association. You’re volunteering. You’re giving time to the Association for the betterment of the community, to sustain the community. And you shouldn’t have it shouldn’t have to be something where you wear armor all the time. We hope you’re leading forward and building up the board member role at your association to that of a respected position where, again, you’re doing a good job helping the community go forward. Thank you, Julie, always a pleasure chatting with you. Any Thank you. You too. Any more, any more closing thoughts at this time? No,

Julie Adamen 30:34
I think I we covered all the big ones. But the one thing I do want to say is that everybody, if you could just create a relationship with your community, your board with another one or two or even three other boards that are around you, and I guarantee you, unless you’re out in the middle of nowhere, there are other boards out there. Create a relationship. Sit down, have coffee on Wednesdays or whatever, or wine and cheese on Thursday nights, whatever it is, and create that relationship so you can bounce things off of each other, but most importantly, to understand you’re not alone. You are not alone. Yeah,

Robert Nordlund 31:07
you don’t have to carry this burden yourself. Well, we hope you learned some HOA insights from our discussion today that helps you bring common sense to your common areas. We look forward to having you join us for another great episode next week,

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