Getting A Better Handle On New Residents

By Andrew Hay, CAMEx, CCAM-ND.PM

Welcome to your new home! Now, call management to tell them you put your trash cans away or you will be fined! Sound familiar? Much too often, new homeowners’ first interaction with their HOA is related to a compliance issue and usually not a pleasant one.

While enforcing the governing documents is an important part of the success of a community, it isn’t necessarily putting the best foot forward for the association or the management company, and the standard traditional welcome letters, while carefully worded to be pleasant and informative, are rarely read (and sometimes not received due to address changes) and can be multiple weeks behind due to slow receipt of new owner information from title companies.

Here are a few ideas on how a manager or management company can welcome new owners with a positive message and a lasting impact.

Welcome Videos Over Welcome Letters

People simply don’t consume information in the same manner they did 10 years ago. While a written welcome letter is great, new owners need something to go back and reference, such as a welcome video that covers the general basics about association living.

A welcome video can be used to highlight important topics like the importance of paying assessments, the governing documents, governance structure, the role of management, and how they can get involved in the association.

Studies show that adults must hear something 7 times before they commit it to memory, so the more touch points you have to convey this important information, the better. Also, giving your staff the ability to send a link to the video helps cut down on time spent giving the same answers over and over again and paper.

Conduct Homeowner Training Sessions

Whether you choose to do this solely with new homeowners or with all the owners within a community, a training session combined with a “meet your neighbors” event is a great way to build community in a friendly format that’s free from the stress and formality of a board meeting.

Let’s face it. As managers, we are often so focused on doing our job to conduct and document board meetings that we aren’t as engaged with owners as we want to be. A training session can help remedy this issue, because it not only offers a less formal environment to get to know your owners, it also helps to build trust with community members, so they see you as a valuable informational resources rather the person who writes terrible letters and raises their dues every year.

Self-Promote At Any Given Opportunity

Whatever method(s) you use to welcome owners to the communities you manage, if you are not doing some level of self-promotion in the welcome process, you are missing out on a rare opportunity to promote yourself to that owner that will most likely not arise at any other time.

Whether that new owner is planning to live in their home for the remainder of their life or they see it as an investment, they’ll be renting or selling in 2 years, so a proper welcome to a community will either be a positive start in a relationship with a future board member or result in a referral to the next community your short-term owners move into.

They say that you only get one chance at a first impression. Our actions are equally as important as the words we use to welcome new owners to a community. It’s not only reflective of the community they moved into, but more so on the management company that was chosen to operate the association.

There is enough bad press and visceral reaction to the term HOA or HOA manager, and a few simple changes to the way we welcome new community members can go a long way to improve those initial feelings homeowners may have.

Andrew Hay, CAMEx, CCAM-ND.PM

Andrew Hay, CAMEx, CCAM-ND.PM, is the Chief Executive Officer of The Helsing Group, Inc.