Condo Media - August 2013 - 48

by Nena Groskind

Feature

How do you Persuade Boards that Professional Management is Worth Paying For?

W

hen searching for words to
describe the community
association manager’s job,
“thankless” will probably
appear somewhere on the list, along
with “challenging,” “multi-faceted,”
“rewarding,” and often (if we’re being
absolutely honest) “underpaid.” There
is nothing easy about what managers
do, but few tasks are more difficult
than persuading boards and owners
that the services managers provide are
worth the fees they charge and probably more.
The best-run communities operate like a pampered motor — quietly,
efficiently, and usually problem-free.
Skilled managers make what they do
seem effortless, which is both a testament to their professionalism and a
lousy marketing strategy. Boards see
the results of good management in the
tasks they don’t have to perform and
the problems they don’t have to solve,
but not the effort required to achieve
them. So some board members question why they should pay so much
for services that (they suspect) others
could provide for less. It doesn’t help
that some managers — less experienced, less professional, and, perhaps,
less reputable — will offer cut-rate fees,
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Condo Media • August 2013

leaving boards to discover too late that
the services they are getting are cutrate as well.
How do managers persuade boards
preoccupied with costs that quality
management is valuable and worth
paying for? We asked two experienced
managers how they handle this problem. Their responses confirm both that
the problem is real and that it can be
managed, if not solved.
Ronan Ryan, president,
RGR Property Management
Boards looking to replace a manager
who has performed poorly and boards
at self-managed communities considering professional management for
the first time pose different challenges
for a manager trying to “sell” the
value of what they do, Ryan says. A
board that has had a bad experience
with one management company “will
be wary” of hiring another, “and I
don’t blame them,” Ryan says. He
tells these boards that he will provide
the services they should have been
getting all along — services that any
good management company should
provide. For boards that haven’t been
getting regular financial reports, or
haven’t been getting them at all, this

can be something of a revelation. “I
tell them, ‘If I don’t give you your
monthly reports by the 20th of the
month, you should call me to find out
why; and if that happens more than
once, you should fire me.’”
For the self-managed community, his
emphasis is on explaining the real costs
of self-management. What the owners
are spending separately on legal fees (to
have an attorney on retainer), accountants’ fees (for bookkeeping services),
and maintenance may far exceed what
they would pay a manager to provide
some of those services and “to tell
them when they need specialized advice,” Ryan says.
The industry’s “bad actors” can
make it difficult to convey the value
message, Ryan agrees. “Although it’s
always easy to look good when the
guy before you was an absolute disaster,” he acknowledges, overcoming
the bad taste left by a poor management company isn’t easy. “We have to
do some rebuilding of the industry”
with those communities. That process
requires setting reasonable expectations from the beginning “and then
going above and beyond them,” Ryan
suggests. Constant communication is
also important.
Condo Media - August 2013

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