Rant/Revel


photo by angela n.

You can talk about whatever is on your mind – quality of life issues, a beautiful tree you spotted, scuttlebutt, or any random questions/thoughts you may have. But please no personal attacks and no need to correct people’s grammar. This is a place to vent and/or celebrate things about daily life in D.C.

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The reality

You’ve probably never read your building’s property management contract all the way through. Most board members haven’t either. If you did, you’d find a carefully defined scope of work — vendors coordinated, maintenance dispatched, assessments collected, reports generated.

What you wouldn’t find: anything about fiduciary duties. Reserve funding strategy. Compliance tracking. Case documentation. Institutional memory. The legal obligations that make your board personally accountable to unit owners.

That’s not an oversight in the contract. It’s the contract. Property management was never designed to cover governance. And yet most boards — paying $10,000 to $18,000 a year for the service — assume it does.

Operations and governance are different jobs. One has a contract. The other has a fiduciary duty.

What your building is paying — and what it’s getting.

What the contract covers. What it doesn’t.

The markup problem most boards don’t know about.

Beyond the management fee, most property management companies mark up vendor invoices — the plumber, the landscaper, the elevator contractor — by 10 to 15 percent before passing the bill to the association. It’s legal. It’s common. And boards have almost no visibility into it. (more…)


Animal Fix

“This is Smokey Lemony Purrsnicket from Takoma Park. 18 years young and the boss of his domain.”

If you have any animal/pet photos you’d like to share please send an email to princeofpetworth(at)gmail(dot)com with ‘Animal Fix’ in the title and say the name of your pet and your neighborhood.  If you love the animal fix and want to ensure PoPville’s long term viability please consider joining our Patreon here.