Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: The work share dollar value of doing coho property management with volunteers vs hiring it out

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Mar 12, 2008, at 2:13 PM, Charles Maclean wrote:

> We are interested in developing a general understanding of the cost of
> hiring a property management firm to contract for these same or  
> similar
> services and their administration.

We have paid $300-$400 a month for facilities management and a similar  
amount for financial management (43 units, large city). They tend to  
charge by the number of units. Financial management is worth it but  
requires supervision and double checking. You might be better off with  
a person who just does financial record-keeping and knows the condo  
business.

Facilities management in our experience just isn't. For a small condo  
-- and in the property management world anything under 400 units is  
small -- the time it takes to make site visits and supervise workers  
just isn't worth it to them. A property manager typically handles 18  
properties. They can visit a large site in the same time it takes to  
go to a small site. They have to talk to the same number of people --  
or in cohousing, even more since all the tasks are divided up. The  
large places get the attention.

We have had some luck in asking management companies for referrals to  
repair people but are still less reliable than asking another service  
provider with whom we have had good luck. Once we found the CAI list  
of providers, we can find people that our old management company took  
months to tell us that "no one does that."

You can ask CAI members to recommend people and when you find a good  
service provider (we have an excellent general construction company)  
ask them to recommend people.

The management company _sometimes_ got bids but didn't supervise the  
person doing the bidding so we didn't really know how reliable they  
were or a sense of how easy it will be to work with the company -- a  
BIG issue since they are often late and reschedule a lot. The  
management company we had second would send repair people out with no  
supervision so we have to do that anyway. After one set of lighting  
fixtures was rejected because they didn't match those in place, the  
company just sent out two more workers with two more fixtures that  
still didn't match. They never looked at them.

We've tried three companies and it was a waste of time. "Your mileage  
may vary."

> We know intuitively that we keep our monthly fees low by doing the  
> work
> ourselves and we also know that working together strengthens our  
> social
> connections and makes it easier to manifest our values of  
> sustainability,
> living simply and community.

I'm not sure how much this is true but you will certainly get better  
work in many areas depending on what skills you have in your community  
and what your standards are. We have great landscaping people and thus  
have a much better landscape than we would have if we hired a  
landscaping service. It's more unique and varied as well as better  
tended.

I think you are better off hiring out specific services than having a  
management company. We have people who like to clean but some of us  
would like to have professional floor cleaners, for example, come in  
quarterly to do deep cleaning and waxing.

There is a disagreement about whether amateur painting is okay or not.  
Some want more professional edges and for the work to be done in less  
time. In painting jobs, residents have taken far more time and far  
more people, and are messier -- unless you have particularly good  
painters in-house who have the time to work consistently until the  
work is done.

So a general management company, I would not recommend, but I, and  
most people here I think, would recommend hiring people to do specific  
jobs depending on your community skills.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing,Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org