Does anyone have a recommendation for software to manage a condominium association?
We are looking for an online tool to manage a 100 unit condo where we can upload our condo documents, update unit owners and provide a forum for unit owners to communicate with one another. Thanks for any suggestions.
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Jul 21, 2015
This is not a single tool however would it make sense to simply create a Wordpress website, and add the free forum plugin called bbPress? The site would have the usual and obvious Home, About, Condos, Blog, Contact Us pages but also would have the forum where your members can sign up and engage each other. With the forum, you can also manage previously answered questions as resources, and I believe it comes with a variety of features enabling you to be able to track engagement and all sorts of stats.
Wordpress (free)
bbPress (free)
You could probably hire a freelancer who could build out a very sleek website for you at low cost. Voila!
Full website, blogging platform, and a managed forum. And no need for people to use Google Drive where email addresses can be visible to others.
Jun 16, 2015
Have you thought about creating a mobile app that your tenants can download creating convenience for you to send communications to them on the one device they have with them 24/7.
You can have many features and can create incentives for tenants to pay early or on time, send push notifications about reminders and much more.
With the proper engagement implementation strategy, this would be a very clever and effective way to wow your management and strengthen your communities.
Let me know if you need more information.
Jun 17, 2015
Thanks Kirk. Do you know of an app to do this or are you saying to build an app?. If the latter, we don't have the resources to build something from scratch.
Jun 7, 2015
Mary-Alice - what's your budget? I've been a big fan of MRI for any of my real estate clients and they have a Condo module.
http://www.mrisoftware.com/condoplus
But its not freeware.
Their Cloud platform is excellent - Citrix access and by now they should be accessible by both Windows and Mac. I just did an implementation of their commercial product for a portfolio of 16 buildings with about 50 leases. The nice part is that documents can be uploaded specifically to each "unit", work orders etc can be tracked by building or by unit, -- I'm just not sure whether there is a place where condo unit holders can communicate with each other. That would take some more research.
Let me know if I can help further.
Regards,
Rich V.
Jun 8, 2015
Thanks Richard. I will take a look. Right now we need less of a way to manage finances and operations and more of a way to communicate with unit owners and increase transparency. This looks like it has a lot of great functionality thought. Thanks again.
Jun 10, 2015
Thought about this one a little more. You may also want to look at something like Cureo, Asana or Podio. I'm not a huge fan of the DropBoxes and the Google Drives for things like this because I haven't found a great way to streamline the communication. Tends to become a jumbled mess. Cureo, Asana and Podio organize the comments to tasks or projects. So those softwares may give you the flexibility to be transparent AND open communications with the condo owners.
RV
Jun 7, 2015
If those are your only requirements you can use for example Google's online services like Sheets, Drive and Groups. Free simple and easy.
Jun 7, 2015
Thanks! Is there a place to add documents? I just went into one of my groups and see threads, but am not seeing a section for documents (like a knowledge library).
Jun 8, 2015
Yes indeed as Charles points out you can upload any documents to Google Drive and even gives you the ability to let multiple people edit documents like spreadsheets or word documents online.
Jun 8, 2015
Thanks again. I've used Google Drive, just haven't connected it with a Google Group. I will spend some time looking into this. My biggest desire is to have one place for an owner to access information and engage.
Excellent advice. Someone recommended the same thing to me, but suggested Wix. I actually just created the website myself. It was super easy. Thanks!