As part of our series of fiduciary studies that focus on the CID budgetary process, the Insurance/Risk Management study seeks to create an interactive tool for boards and portfolio managers to find the most affordable options for community insurance needs. Each study will include risk mitigation suggestions from industry professionals.
Our primary audience for this study’s results is board members struggling with rising premiums. Communities participating will benefit from the best professional advice available in their region. And the CID professionals and companies who participate will be showcased throughout the site.
Insurance carriers and agents
HOAhomepage will be seeking Insurance Carriers and Agencies, regional management companies, and local portfolio managers in a dozen US states. These agencies will populate each county in a region with at least one agent with CIRM credentials. The portfolio managers will select CIDs of certain types to be part of the study.
CID Builders and Investors
The Building industry must be part of the solutions we discover in this effort.
Builders have been impacted by insurance coverage for CIDS for decades. We want builders to participate in our insurance/risk management study because they create the initial CA budget and are named insured. This platform is also for CID investment portfolio management, with properties covering numerous CIDs, which can offer valuable insight.
CID professionals (CIDpro)
Over the next few years, we will build a network of vetted CID portfolio managers, and professionals in ancillary industry services in all fifty states. These professionals will participate in the study of all major budgetary line items.
We intend to feature and promote risk management professionals serving community associations. We are looking for firms that serve multiple counties within our regional structure. Someone in your firm must hold an active CIRMS credential. Or agree to obtain one. All CID related credentials are important to this model.
HOAhomepage is recruiting insurance agencies to participate in selecting CID managers to lead teams of CID professionals regionally. These teams will profile individual subdivisions. Our agency partners will curate CID insurance information and RM advice on a regional level through our regional structure. HOAhomepage
They will host a risk management forum and develop a risk assessment survey for communities. Additionally, we want to archive your articles, videos, and other information, that feature your firm. The point is to have you available to respond to our homeowners, boards and portfolio managers.. We will deliver this information to a targeted audience, who are owners of, or have a special interest in specific HOAs in the region. You would be part of a system that will catalog all residential and commercial CIDs in the US to form a registry. Your profile will include metadata from every CID in your region. You can also choose the portfolio managers who will help promote you.
Codifying the CID industry
My name is Dick Gordon, I have been a professional serving Common Interest Developers since the 1970s. As a CPA I started providing a fiduciary service for community association boards as part of my accounting practice. All of my community clients were self managed. We added portfolio site managers when needed, but this was before the CAI and professional associations spread to the states and offered education and credentials. Over the last 50 years common interest developments have grown from a niche type of subdivision to dominating the production housing industry. Along with this growth is the proliferation of state and local statutes controlling community associations in all states. Most of the increase in assessments since the 1990s is due to statute compliance, not inflation. Part of this registry is codifying CID statutes and proposed legislation, state by state. And allowing owners to wiegh in. And possibly form a lobby to message policy makers. A key professional constituency are CID attorneys who will participate on a county level.
HOAhomepage has been researching the industry for nearly 25 years, primarily for the building industry, which is the market we will continue to serve. Over the last several years we have focused on the individual CI property owner’s needs. We believe this is the best way to eventually reach decision-makers within the community. Most of this research looked at buyers of common interest properties and the professionals they use prior to purchase. As a result, we developed a business model that focuses on facilitating the real estate needs of CI property buyers, which creates a connection point in each community with each transaction. We created an owner-to-owner property exchange, to provide property owners with access to professionals we have vetted. This exchange provides us with an opportunity to help buyers and establish a permanent relationship with them. We provide these owners with an archive for everything HOA-related. And over time a direct board or management connection, where our CID professionals can brand themselves.
There are 350k CIDs in the US, our structure allocates these CIDs to teams of specific credentialed professionals. We promote them to the buyers we are helping and the owners we are connected to. The rest of this article is about Insurance agencies with a CIRMS.
HOAhomepage provides transaction management for the exchange and development services to home builders.
As part of this registry, data collection will catalog all individual properties as well as any ownership data that is publically available. However, as we deliver our services, we will build a network of property owners. We created a property owners association where we can make more permanent connections.
For example, a board member is concerned about their community’s exposure to some natural risk and their agent doesn’t have the expertise. He searches for Risk management specialists, City, state, zip code and nothing else. Somewhere in his internal browser profile and settings, his home address and association can be found. We will have a published article regarding his specific questions, as will be the case for dozens, if not hundreds, of other insurance professionals in any searched city county or state. However, our publication includes links and tags that will lead to his address and association and of course, his name, which will be included in our database. Once we get him to your article, we can explore his other needs and hopefully he will see the value of using our platform as a board member.
Browser search engines like Google, chrome, etc, use more and more complicated algorithms to return results on submitted search terms. However, the browser also looks for relevance of pages to the searcher, by looking at their internal profile and settings. Regardless of whether the profile includes the search terms, if a page includes some meta data that also appears in their user’s profile, it will return high on the search results. On our site we use AI applications that dynamically update SEO settings as data is archived.
Your published profile on HOAhomepage will have links to every CID in your region, once added to our registry. In most of our regions there will be thousands of CIDs. You and your agents will be branded on the published profile of the community.
Every association located in a region that experiences natural disasters considers the risks for the community, and seek the appropriate RM professional. However all association boards need to understand all risks to the community components, as well as their property owners and have in hand advice they can pass on.
However, retaining an insurance company with risk management credentials to help guide policy, is not common. Typically, a board will turn to their insurance agent to help plan mitigation, which is the prudent thing to do. We believe, however, that the CIRMS contributes much more insight and access to current industry information. And we want to promote professionals who are experts. We intend to publish articles, links, forums, and any other information contributed by our insurance associates, intended to inform boards of their due diligence. We want to promote, on a regional level, insurance agencies that are branded as common interest insurance specialists and have a footprint in each county in the region. From this regional perch, our insurance specialist will be branded on everything published in the region. see below. We are not creating a directory, in fact, we are looking for companies where our data collection structure and their business development efforts are compatible. We plan to maximize your market share, by, not only, branding you with association portfolio managers, but with board members all over your region.
There will only be one risk manager associated with a region. We want this professional to create a template for a report that a board member or manager can present for consideration. Using our community and regional data we can more efficiently create the report. It is up to you whether you use this as a revenue stream or just branding
Subject communities
We will target communities based on regions and CID type. The list below includes both residential and commercial use.
- Condominiums (highrise)
- Condominiums (lowrise)
- Attached (PUD)
- Detached (PUD)
Portfolio managers
HOAhomepage will be actively recruiting CID portfolio managers to help vet ancillary CID services.
Homeowners
HOAhomepage.com is developing a national registry of common interest subdivisions, including developable land and course of construction developments. The data collection is organized on a regional level, for example California has 13 regions- using commonly used real estate descriptions, which include one or more counties. Each county is divided into HOABlocks of varing sizes, based on the number of CIDs included. Each subdivision is profiled to provide investors and other buyers with a snapshot of the community, including market data, but also information provided by residents. For investors, this profile includes the estimated ROI by model type, prepared by the HOAblock appraiser. For prospective resident owners, the profile focuses more on the community and the municipality it is located in. The profile data is tailored by the user, based on their needs and the data available. We collect information that becomes available during real estate transactions. However, our interactions with prospective owners start well before they enter the market, by our design. Our research revealed certain common characteristics of several buyer types where we can connect with them years in advance and help enhance their expience. To maintain the relationship over this period, we created the Common Interest Property Owners Association, as an information hub and social network. But this association also allows us to scale the solutions we identify.
HOAhomepage has been researchng the industry for 25 years. In recent years we have been looking at the professionals who serve this industry. We were looking for the standout companies and innovative ideas regarding management and marketing. Not surprisingly, what we found is that the property owner’s “trust factor” is largely directed at the portfolio manager versus the management company. However, brand recognition is mostly company’s brand. According to the CAI there are about 55k certified managers in the US. Most of these managers hold some credential other than community management related. RE licenses, appraisal, mortgage, property inspection are some of the credentials we found. Our platform harnesses this pool of professionals, by allowing a selected few to market themselves through our platform.
We organize and manage transactions through an owner-to-owner property exchange, in addition to providing the building industry with developable land. Data will be collected each time we manage a transaction. Below I will try to give you an overview of the business model, but the entire system revolves around what we call an HOABlock. An HOAblock is a target market of common interest developments.
The objective of HOAhomepage is to develop the structure of a data collection system in conjunction with a localized advisory service directed at three types of consumers. Board members, homeowners, home buyers.
- Board members: Initially targeting self-managed communities. The advisory service will vet professionals who are part of community governance, like election services, mediaries, attorneys, hosting online meetings, replacement reserve services, collection services etc. The core revenue stream will come from managing the RFP process, as well as specialty consulting. fees.
- Homeowners: The advisory service will vet professionals that the homeowners might use, that have a working knowledge of CIDs. This will include real estate professionals, appraisers, trust services, inspection service, investment advisors and many other displines.
We are dividing the US into regions within each state. These regions are information hubs
Our objective is to serve the leadership of community associations. Conversely we are providing CID professionals with a platform to focus their branding efforts. We do this by engaging with professionals
The premise is that if CID professionals can brand and engage directly with property owners in communities where they would like to boost their brand, they will enhance their personal professional profile and increase the probability of receiving “Requests for Proposal” from prospective clients.