How to Hire, Evaluate, and Fire a Florida HOA Property Management Company

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 what good management companies do well and I have personally experienced what happens when one is doing a bad job and you are not sure how to get out of the relationship. The transition away from a poorly performing management company is harder than getting in, and most boards do not realize that until they are already trapped by a contract they did not read carefully enough.

Here is what the management companies will not tell you.

When Property Management Actually Makes Sense

I want to be fair before I get into the harder parts. There are situations where professional management is genuinely the right choice.

Communities with complex operations benefit most. A high-rise condo with elevators, a pool, a gym, valet parking, and a full-time maintenance staff has a genuinely different operational profile than an eight-unit beachside building. The larger and more complex the community, the more there is to be said for professional management.

Boards with limited bandwidth benefit from the accounting and compliance functions. Setting up a chart of accounts, maintaining a general ledger, issuing 1099s to vendors, and preparing financial reports requires consistent attention to detail. If your board does not have a treasurer with the time and confidence to handle this correctly, paying for professional accounting oversight is often worth the cost.

Communities with high owner turnover or frequent board transitions benefit from the institutional continuity a management company provides. When the board president changes every two years and no one is tracking the compliance calendar, a management company becomes the organizational memory.

Acknowledge those situations honestly before deciding. If none of them apply to your community, the cost-benefit math may not favor professional management and you should at least run the numbers.

The Questions Nobody Thinks to Ask When Hiring

Most boards interview management companies the same way they interview vendors for any other job: they ask for a price, look at a presentation, and make a decision based on how polished the sales pitch was. Here are the questions that actually matter and that most boards never ask.

How many communities does each individual manager in your firm carry right now? Not how many the company manages in total. How many does the specific person who will be assigned to my community handle? If the answer is more than eight, follow up by asking how they handle the periods when multiple communities have overlapping deadlines: budget season, annual meeting preparation, hurricane recovery. The honest answer to this question tells you most of what you need to know about their capacity.

What is your process for transitioning a new community onto your platform? What records do you need from us, in what format, and by when? A company with a clearly defined onboarding process has done this before and has thought about what can go wrong. A company that gives you a vague answer has not.

What happens if we terminate the contract? In what format will you return our records, how long will it take, and who pays for the transition costs? Florida law now requires management companies to return all community records within 20 business days of contract termination or a written board request. Ask them to confirm they understand this requirement and have a process for meeting it. If they push back on this question, that is information.

What CAM will be specifically assigned to our community and can we verify their license? Florida requires that any association with annual revenues exceeding $100,000 or more than 10 units be managed by a licensed Community Association Manager. Verify the specific individual's license through the DBPR portal at myfloridalicense.com before signing anything. Do not assume the firm's overall license covers everyone who works there. Verify the individual.

What does your contract include at the base fee and what costs extra? Management companies often quote an attractive base fee and then charge separately for things like attending additional meetings, preparing special documents, handling vendor coordination above a certain volume, or processing owner correspondence beyond a monthly threshold. Get the full picture of what you will actually pay annually, not just the monthly base fee.

Can we speak with two or three current client communities comparable to ours in size and property type? Any management company that has been doing good work will provide references without hesitation. A company that hedges on this question is telling you something.

What the 2024 and 2025 Law Changes Mean for Management Contracts

Florida significantly expanded its regulation of community association managers through HB 1203 in 2024 and HB 913 in 2025. Boards hiring or renewing management contracts need to know what the law now requires.

Management contracts must now include a statement in at least 12-point font affirming that the community association manager will abide by all professional standards and recordkeeping requirements imposed by Chapter 468 of the Florida Statutes. If you are reviewing a management contract that does not include this disclosure, the contract predates this requirement and should be updated.

CAMs must attend at least one member meeting annually for each community they manage. If your current management company is managing your community entirely through emails and phone calls without a single in-person or video-conference meeting attendance per year, they are not meeting the statutory minimum.

CAMs must maintain an active online licensure account with the DBPR that identifies the management firm they work for and each community they are the designated onsite CAM for. This creates a publicly searchable record. You can look up any Florida CAM and see which communities they are listed as managing. If your manager is not in the system, they are non-compliant.

CAMs must disclose any conflicts of interest and may not enter into contracts beyond routine CAM services without board approval. If your manager has been steering vendors your way or has any financial relationship with vendors doing work in your community, that relationship must be disclosed and approved by two-thirds of the directors present at a meeting.

A rebuttable presumption of conflict now exists when CAMs enter into contracts beyond routine management services. This is a meaningful protection that did not previously exist and boards should understand it.

CAMs whose licenses are revoked are prohibited from having any ownership interest in or holding positions at a management firm for ten years after revocation. This closes a loophole that previously allowed people with revoked licenses to continue operating through other entities.

How to Evaluate Your Current Management Company

If you already have a management company and you are questioning whether it is working, here is a structured way to evaluate the relationship rather than making a reactive decision based on the most recent frustration.

Track the errors over a defined period. Pull the last twelve months of financial reports and check them for accuracy. Look at the last year of meeting notices and confirm they went out with the required advance notice. Review the vendor contracts and confirm they were properly executed and filed. If you are finding recurring errors, document them in writing and bring them to the management company's attention formally before making any termination decision. You want a record that you raised the concerns and what the response was.

Assess the responsiveness. How quickly do owner inquiries get answered? How quickly does the board get responses to questions? Is your manager available during business hours? Are you getting the statutory minimum of one in-person meeting attendance per year? These are baseline service standards that the law now supports.

Review the financials against the budget. Are the monthly financials being prepared and delivered on time? Is the ledger being reconciled monthly? Are you seeing variances between actual and budgeted expenses that were never explained? Financial slippage that goes unexplained for months is a warning sign.

Have a direct conversation with the management company before making a termination decision. In my experience, boards that raise concerns formally in writing get one of two responses: the company takes it seriously and improves, or the company confirms through its response that it is not capable of meeting your expectations. Either outcome is useful.

How to Get Out of a Management Contract

If you have decided to terminate, here is what you need to know before you send anything.

Read the termination clause in your contract right now. Before you do anything else. Most management contracts have a required notice period for termination, typically 30 to 90 days. Some contracts have early termination fees or limitations on when termination is permitted. Know exactly what your contract says before you send a single email.

Send the termination notice in the format the contract requires. Most contracts specify written notice by certified mail. If the contract requires certified mail and you terminate by email, the termination may not be legally effective under the contract terms. Follow the exact procedure the contract specifies.

Request your records immediately upon terminating. Florida law requires the management company to return all community records within 20 business days of contract termination or a written request. Send a written request for records on the same day you send the termination notice or very shortly after. Define specifically what records you need: the general ledger, bank statements, all vendor contracts, all official correspondence, the owner list, the delinquency ledger, meeting minutes, and any inspection or compliance reports. The 20-day clock starts running from the date of the written request.

Do not assume the transition will be easy. In practice, management companies that are being terminated are not always cooperative. They may be slow with records, deliver records in formats that are difficult to use, or create other friction in the transition. The 20-business-day legal deadline gives you recourse, but you have to enforce it. If records are not returned within 20 business days of your written request, consult the association's attorney about the options available under Florida law.

Start organizing the records you already have access to before you terminate. Most communities have access to some of their own records through the management portal. Download and organize what you can while you still have access. Once you terminate and the company locks you out of their portal, which sometimes happens before the records transfer is complete, you want to have as much as possible already secured.

Select and onboard a new management company or confirm your self-management plan before the termination is effective. The overlap period between the old company winding down and the new arrangement being operational is where things go wrong. Do not create a gap.

Starting the Self-Management Conversation

If the management company experience has convinced your board to consider self-management, the chapter on self-managing in this book covers the roles, the compliance calendar, and the accounting basics in detail. The short version is that self-management is genuinely viable for small to mid-size communities with a stable, committed board. The cost savings are real. The work is manageable with the right systems. The risks are also real if the board lacks the time or the organizational discipline to stay on top of the compliance calendar.

Make that evaluation honestly before you terminate. Do not fire the management company in frustration and then discover six months later that nobody on the board has time to do the accounting. That outcome is worse than a mediocre management company.

The best management company relationships I have seen work are ones where the board and the manager have a clear understanding of roles, where the board stays engaged and does not assume the manager is handling everything, and where the board reviews the financials and compliance calendar regularly enough to catch problems before they become crises.

The worst ones are the opposite: a board that hired a company and stopped paying attention, and a company that knew it.

For a complete guide to running a Florida HOA or condo association including the full comparison of self-management versus professional management, pick up a copy of Run the Board.