When I took over as president of my Florida condo association, we were paying a property management company. Within a year, we were not. That decision has saved my community thousands of dollars annually that now go directly into our reserve account instead of a management fee. I want to be completely honest about what that transition required and what it did not, because the internet is full of content telling boards that self-management is either effortless or impossible. N

I spent about thirty minutes on the QuickBooks community forum before writing this post. The HOA section reads like a support group. Treasurers trying to figure out how to set up reserve accounts without affecting their bank balance. Boards asking whether to record dues as pledges or invoices. Someone wanting to know which equity account type to use for replacement reserves. Another person discovering that QuickBooks calls their dues billing "pledges" by default because it as

I want to start this post with a confession that will either make you trust me more or trust me less depending on your perspective. I built HOA management software. HOA Engine is a platform I wrote specifically for Florida HOA and condo communities, and I run it on my own association right now during its beta phase. That is a conflict of interest and you deserve to know it upfront. Here is why I am telling you this and then writing the comparison anyway. I built HOA Engine be

In April 2026, a property management bookkeeper in Martin County, Florida turned herself in to face 124 felony charges. She had stolen nearly $200,000 from two homeowners associations and spent it on Disney World trips, a New York vacation, plastic surgery, and a wedding. The Martin County Sheriff described the outcome plainly: there is none left to claw back. She spent it all. This was not an isolated case. Over $16 million was stolen from Florida HOAs in just a six-month pe

The first HOA meeting I ever attended ended with the board president screaming profanities at a new owner. By the time I took over as president, that dynamic had been the norm for years. Owners who raised concerns were immediately reprimanded. Board decisions were made without explanation. Nobody trusted anyone. The building was a collection of people who happened to share walls, not a community. I did not fix that overnight. But I did fix it. And the tools I used were not co

When I first became board president, I did what I suspect most new board members do. I skimmed the bylaws, noted the general structure, and assumed I understood enough to get started. I did not read the declaration carefully. I did not map every component of the property against the document's definitions. I did not check whether any provisions were outdated or conflicted with current Florida statute. I paid for that eventually. When our balcony dispute came to a head and a l

The first HOA meeting I ever attended ended with the board president screaming profanities at a new owner. The second one was more of the same. By the time I took over as president I had watched years of meetings accomplish almost nothing because nobody knew how to run one correctly and nobody felt safe enough to speak honestly in the room. I fixed the culture problem first because nothing else works without it. But I also had to fix the procedural problem, and that turned ou

When I took over as president of my community association, one of the first things I had to figure out was the accounting. We were a small community, we did not have a property manager at the time, and our finances were a mess. The previous board had been keeping a rough spreadsheet and a checkbook and calling it accounting. It was not. I had an engineering background, not an accounting background. But I approached the accounting problem the same way I approach any engineerin

I am going to say something that might surprise you coming from a board president: owners have more legal protections in Florida than most boards want them to know about, and more than most owners realize they have. I have been on both sides of this. I was the frustrated owner who did not know his rights before I became the board president who had to learn what the law actually required. What I found is that Florida has built a remarkably comprehensive framework of owner prot

The first budget I ever built for my community association was not pretty. I had just taken over as board president, I had $10,000 in the bank, a failing roof to fund, and absolutely no background in association accounting. I did what most first-time board presidents do: I looked at what the previous board had spent, added a small percentage for inflation, and hoped the numbers were in the right ballpark. They were not. I had underestimated insurance, missed an escalation cla

I want to start with a confession. Every article you will find online about how to choose a Florida HOA management company is written by a management company or a software platform selling to management companies. They all have a financial interest in telling you that professional management is essential and that switching is complicated. Neither of those things is categorically true. I have managed my community both with professional management and without it. I have seen wh

In my years as board president I have had more than a few difficult conversations with owners who were behind on their assessments. I have heard every story: job losses, medical emergencies, divorces, business failures. Every one of those situations was real and I approached each of them with genuine empathy. I also had a responsibility to the other nine owners in my community who were paying their dues every month and counting on the association to meet its obligations. At s

Before I became board president, a lawsuit had been sitting over my community like a storm cloud for years. A balcony belonging to one unit had deteriorated to the point where it was physically pulling the building's stucco away as it shifted. The owner refused to repair it. The previous board warned the owner repeatedly. Nobody acted. Eventually the association sued the owner, the owner sued back claiming the HOA was responsible, and the whole thing dragged on while the balc

For years, the vote to waive reserves at the annual Florida condo meeting was about as controversial as voting on the color of the pool furniture. Owners would gather, the board would present the option to waive reserve contributions for another year, and most rooms would vote yes without much discussion. Who wants to pay more in dues when you can kick the can down the road? The answer, which Florida is learning in real time, is that the can eventually hits a wall. And in a l

When I first heard that Florida was going to require HOA and condo associations to maintain a compliant website, I will be honest: my first reaction was somewhere between an eye-roll and mild panic. I am the president of a small beachside condo community on the Space Coast. None of us got into this to run a web operation. But the more I dug into what is actually required and why, the more I realized the law is solving a real problem. Before this requirement existed, owners wh

I remember the first HOA meeting I ever attended as a board member. I had just agreed to become president of our small Space Coast condo association to solve a looming financial crisis. I had no roadmap, no training, and no one who had done it before me willing to walk me through what the role actually required. I figured it out through a combination of research, mistakes, and a lot of late nights reading Florida statutes. That was a harder way to learn than it needed to be.

I grew up in Sebastian, Florida. In 2004, Frances and Jeanne hit the Space Coast back to back within three weeks of each other. I was old enough to understand what was happening and young enough that it left a permanent impression. By the time I bought my first beachside condo years later, hurricane preparedness was not an abstract concept for me. It was something I took seriously from day one. When I became board president, that same instinct applied to the whole community.

When the Champlain Towers South collapsed in Surfside in 2021, 98 people died in a building that engineering assessments had flagged for structural problems years earlier. The response from Florida's legislature was sweeping and fast. Within months, new laws required that aging Florida condo buildings undergo formal structural inspections and that the reserves to fund future structural repairs be fully funded and non-waivable. Those laws have been refined in every legislative

The first HOA meeting I ever attended ended with the board president screaming profanities at a new owner. The second one was more of the same. By the time I took over as president I had watched a pattern repeat itself across every meeting for years: an owner complains, the board overreacts, nothing actually gets resolved, and everyone leaves angrier than when they arrived. I have also been on the other end. When we had a genuine safety violation in our community, an owner bl

When I took over as president of my Space Coast condo association, we had $10,000 in the bank. The building was insured at $1.5 million. The hurricane deductible on our policy was 5%. Do the math. Five percent of $1.5 million is $75,000. Before our insurance would pay a single dollar on a hurricane claim, we would have had to come up with $75,000 out of pocket. We had $10,000. We would have had to special assess every owner in the association just to cover the deductible befo