Community managers wear many hats in their business relationship with the associations they manage. They act as a liaison, a resource, and a consultant to help the association boards they serve to make decisions. Community managers have the…
I wish someone had told me the nuances of trying to cultivate a community while also trying to manage a business,” said Pat Burke, the current president of the Fieldstondale co-op in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, when asked what he wi…
Like beauty, what constitutes an 'amenity'—particularly a 'luxury' amenity—may well be in the eye of the beholder. Young families may want indoor and outdoor play equipment, while professionals may appreciate a well-appointed gym, and senio…
Probably the biggest point of tension for any condo, HOA or co-op board is a pet ban. Enacting one can be a heated affair, leading to fights and arguments throughout the building community, but maintaining a ban on pets can also result in a…
For over a century, states have had laws, rules and regulations in place to ensure that employees who are injured while performing their jobs are adequately taken care of. An uninsured employer that finds itself embroiled in a workers' comp…
As any manager, board president or building administrator rightly knows, protecting your building community against a man-made catastrophe, natural disaster, act of God, or just basic negligence, is not a trivial task. Property casualty in…
Q. Our condominium building has assigned parking spaces, and the space for our unit is quite a distance from the entrance. As we’ve gotten older, my wife has developed difficulty in walking. We asked the board if we could get a space clos…
A town with a reputation for the elite, and nearest metropolitan neighbor to Boston, Brookline, Massachusetts is the birthplace of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, late night comedian Conan O’Brien, and the last home of Pulitzer and Nobel…
These days, pretty much everyone has a smart phone, which means they have a computer in their hands all day, every day. That makes it difficult to take true vacation days, to 'unplug' on the weekend, and to “leave work at work.” Our work li…
While it's pretty much impossible for a condo board, HOA or an employee thereof to commit fraud on the scale of a Bernie Madoff or any one of the greed-driven shysters who have made headlines in recent years, building boards and managers ce…