Property managers and HOA Boards often get a bad rap because most of the communication with homeowners skews negative, such as, “you painted your house the wrong color and now you must redo all of it!”, or “hurry up and pull those weeds!”  While these messages to homeowners for compliance issues are necessary for community maintenance, often they are interpreted as personal attacks, or at least a nuisance.  With the warmer spring weather, homeowners are usually more interested in beautifying their homes, which presents a great opportunity to property managers for positive reinforcement.  Here are some ideas on how to use uManage and the eUnify homeowner portal - Community Link to facilitate positive community yard campaigns:

In conversations with eUnify clients recently, best practices for leveraging the CommunityLink homeowner portal has emerged as a recurring theme. I have observed clients utilize the portal with varying degrees of success and have come up with a short list of ideas for making the most of the community portal. Basically, it comes down to building content. Think about your favorite news site. You probably visit it a couple times a day. If content isn’t constantly refreshed, you are easily bored and unlikely to peruse outdated headlines. While announcements, events, and documents in your community portal are slower to change than the day’s headlines, building a library of content will encourage homeowners to come to the portal site more often. Here are some ideas for maximizing usage of the eUnify CommunityLink portal:

Portals offer valuable conveniences to homeowners, such as online payments, easy access to forms and documents, and announcements, among others, but the portal should be more than a convenient tool, it should be about building an online community. Portals provide the platform to communicate, collaborate, and build community. Here are 3 tips to make eUnify's homeowner portal, CommunityLink a place where homeowners gather.

A version of this article was first posted in July 2019. Here is repost again in preparation for Arizona's monsoon season and  (More 2020 Monsoon Details here)

Phoenicians look forward to monsoon with the eagerness of NASCAR-goers awaiting a car crash. There’s beauty in the destructive power of the unpredictable storms in this season. Two of my brothers who now live out of state plan visits during the annual monsoon season to satisfy a nostalgic craving for the theatrics of mile-high walls of dust, fierce lightning, and flash flooding, along with the thrill of waiting to see how much force nature will unleash. Just last night, the first of these cracked open the skies with an impressive lightning show, rain, and microbursts of wind. I had dinner with a friend and stopped for a second leaving the restaurant to take in the gorgeous yet ominous sunset with a storm looming in the distance, and then got in my car and thought nothing of it. I made it home before even the air stirred. As soon as I was home, I got a message from my friend whose house apparently was in the path of a microburst while we were at dinner. The message said, “OMG, the pool! It’s brown and there’s half a tree in it!”.

When it comes to portals, the idea is to build community. CommunityLink’s relevant content and ease of access offers homeowners convenient participation in their community. As a manager or board member or vendor, you benefit by making basic functions and information accessible to residents on a self-serve basis, while providing a space where everyone in the community belongs.  Learn more about each of our portals below.

CommunityLink for homeowners and residents is available as a mobile app in the Google Play and Apple App stores. The mobile version of the portal provides a clean, concise interface that’s intuitive and easy to use. Homeowners can view their personal account information and community information in the app. Go to your app store and look for “CommunityLink” by eUnify. 

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.

All of us involved in servicing community associations, whether we be vendors, managers, or board members, have the important task of keeping up with legislative trends. Some states have much more complex statutes than others regarding this area of law, but we can expect that trends in these few states that are population centers and planned development community hotspots (California, Florida, Texas) will set precedent and find their way into the legislative agendas of other states. Recently, litigation initiated in Florida, seeks to enforce communities with an online presence into ADA compliance. This post is a follow-up to a previous post regarding Florida legislation requiring community associations to have online resources for all homeowners to access key documents (see, “Portal Up, It’s the Law). Let’s explore the current litigation and how to ensure you aren’t caught in the crosshairs of a similar complaint.

In conversations with eUnify clients recently, best practices for leveraging the CommunityLink homeowner portal has emerged as a recurring theme. I have observed clients utilize the portal with varying degrees of success and have come up with a short list of ideas for making the most of the community portal. Basically, it comes down to building content. Think about your favorite news site. You probably visit it a couple times a day. If content isn’t constantly refreshed, you are easily bored and unlikely to peruse outdated headlines. While announcements, events, and documents in your community portal are slower to change than the day’s headlines, building a library of content will encourage homeowners to come to the portal site more often. Here are some ideas for maximizing usage of the eUnify CommunityLink portal:

You might be thinking, “New Year, new me” in 2020. If part of what’s new for your in the New Year is election to your HOA Board, or a new career in HOA management, there will be a learning curve related to all the new tasks in your new position. Whether you’re a new board member or property manager, your concerns will be focused on efficiency, communication, transparency, and understanding the metrics that paint the picture of how the association is doing. Board members need to be in the know to fulfill their duties, and rely on managers to present all relevant information for their decision-making. The eUnify Board Portal is a valuable tool in addressing all of these areas of focus in the following ways: