Portal up, It's the Law

Maintaining an association website and/or portal is extremely useful in making community documents, events, and other information available to homeowners while saving managers and boards valuable time.This convenience is no longer an option for condominium associations with more than 150 units in Florida, where the state legislature has recently passed a bill to require websites for associations. The new laws even detail potential criminal penalties for noncompliance.

This new law also dictates some of the required content for association sites, including official records of the association (CC&Rs, bylaws, etc.). The law specifies that bids for materials, equipment, or services are to be considered “official records” for inclusion on the association website/portal. as well as mandating accessibility to these documents by non-owner tenants.

We refer to the eUnify portals as “Resident” portals, rather than homeowner portals, because we make it easy to add and track tenants and grant them unique portal access to community level information. Tenants are a welcomed addition to the member directories of eUnify portals. Giving tenants convenient access to community information could give them more buy-in with the community, and certainly having online access to governing documents makes it easier for tenants to understand and therefore abide by association rules. In eUnify portals, private, homeowner information is hidden from view of non-owner residents. This facilitates compliance with tenant access to official records without compromising private information of unit or lot owners.

While your association, or those you manage may not be in Florida, when it comes to HOAs and legislation, Florida, California, and Texas take the lead; as Florida leads on this issue, many other states are likely to follow.   For Florida associations, the deadline for compliance is July 1, 2018.  Luckily, not only is there is still time to comply, but compliance is really easy through eUnify’s Resident Portals. For everyone not facing such a deadline, it is still a good idea to consider your options and get ahead of any legislative changes that might be coming down the pipeline.