When you purchased your condo what are your expectations versus what you received? Difficult boards of directors, terrible management companies, uninformed owners, little to no information and no way to navigate the building.
You found your dream condo and you've moved in......
You hoped for a community and an understanding that we are all in this together. What was your first sign that you just purchased your unit in a good building or a poorly managed building?
It takes a while to get oriented when you move into a condo unit, there are so many areas to discover and so many challenges. By the day I had moved into the building I was already fed up with the management company and had honestly never met a more uninviting hostile group of people who I now realized worked for me as an owner of the corporation and was clearly lacking in service. Yes, the management company works for every owner in this building, not the board but every single owner and is responsible to every single owner. I tried to complain to the board and that fell on deaf ears. I tried to complain to the owners of the management company and those complaints were ignored. It was clear that I was in a situation where no one cared about the lack of service from the management company and it seemed like the board didn't care very much. Every owner I ran into complained about the management company but not one owner had any solutions and was sitting waiting for the board. The board didn't want to hear and when you tried to message them or email them they didn't bother to return emails and clearly didn't care about the owner's concerns. The property management company was bad and the board was bad.
Most owners of condos forget or don't really take the time to understand that they don't just own their unit they are shareholders in the corporation and the building. Every owner is responsible for every inch of the building and every inch of that building is taken into consideration when they are selling their unit. Except for a small number of issues, private issues of owners every situation or event in that building should be communicated to the owners and every situation or event the board is the responsibility of the board to resolve. The board manages the building with the assistance and expertise of the management company. It is the board that manages the building and they need to make sure that the management company is helping, fixing and resolving ALL owner issues. The board and the management company are accountable to the owners of the building.
A really poor management company is one indicator that the board of directors is flawed, lazy or isn't actually governing and managing the building. If the management company doesn't care how they treat the owners then clearly the board is lacking. They are lacking an understanding of their roles and responsibility. When your management company treats the owners poorly then don't count on the board being a reasonable entity that will be able to manage not only the building day to day but in a crisis.
I added this picture of the boxes because it took me months to find the garbage room where I needed to put mine. I stacked my boxes in my locker for months until I finally found someone to ask where the garbage room was. There was no map, no welcome package and no way to navigate the building and not a single owner or board member gave a damn about my experience. After I moved in I discovered the condo board had really been lacking for many years but there was no way to determine how bad they were. There was no one who could have saved me from this building and honestly I loved my unit, its beautiful so I might have bought it anyway but had I known I would have known what to expect and it would have been my choice. My lawyer checked his boxes, the reserve study, etc. but that wasn't enough. Its not enough, you need to know there is a fully functioning operational entity called the board of directors who is actively managing the building. I wish I had someone review the competency of the board or how well they were managing or if they were managing. The building was dated but that was easy to fix thought. There really was no way to know how bad things were in this building that I chose to invest in.
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