The Role of an HOA Project Coordinator
TRANSCRIPT:
My name is Ben Tryon, I’m the property coordinator here at CAP Management. What that means is, the property managers, five of them, are out at their 50-plus properties all throughout the week, so they’re only actually in the office about 15 percent of the time, or are working remotely on their laptops. So, calls and emails come in here to me, and I have all the tools, the same tools they have available to them, and I’m kind of the, well the voice on the line for homeowners, board members, vendors, etc, when dealing with your HOA.
Say a homeowner calls in and they have an issue, I give them the tools, as well as lead them towards an understanding of HOA management and homeowner responsibilities. That, in turn, is all based on the governing document: the declarations, the rules, regulations, and the by-laws of a community. None of the decisions made are capricious, or are on a whim. They’re all based off of legal documents, and are guided in that regard. A homeowner calls in about a plumbing leak, we help determine where the homeowner lives, what floor, what type of leak it is, where it is located, what is being affected in the unit, and in the building at large, and then move towards a decision from there.
I enter in most of those work orders, as well as develop those relationships with vendors, and then if there’s a larger project at hand, I will develop their request for proposal for a vendor and have those minimum three vendors out and bidding, and negotiating for contracts with the board member and the property manager for the HOA. I also lend a hand to the property manager for larger tasks, or I will take things off of their plate. For example, in downtown Denver, there is a program that is designed by the city to reduce energy and energy costs through electricity and natural gas minimalization and making buildings greener, and of a more environmentally viable status. So that program is something that I help administer for all of our HOAs, to make them more coherent with the vision of Denver and of greener properties.
So, you can see back here, there is a spreadsheet, typical Excel spreadsheet, that’s color-coded and has different, basically, kind of a medical code in a way. All of it delineates what has been going on at a property, at a specific address, and so forth. A homeowner would call in, and they would be categorized by the different colors, which are five different colors for property managers, Jonathan Cole, Jonathan Ellsworth, John Krajewski, Aaron Monaco, and Chris Stange. Then there is the issue at hand, and then whether I was able to solve it right then and there, or whether I needed to pull in some other individuals, or different entities, and as you can see, this is just one month’s worth, but it’s several hundred calls and contacts each time. And that’s just for the phone calls, not including the emails.
We also try to make sure that each and every homeowner does get a call back, but in order for that to happen, you have to actually leave a message if we don’t pick up. So, we are very good at making sure that we get in contact with you, and in order to do that, we have to know how to get in contact with you. And then I also wanted to point out the emergency pager system. If I’m not here or if it is after hours, we have an emergency line that a homeowner can call with, if you know, there’s something like not a fire, or not a flood, that would be for emergency services. But if there’s something going on that is an emergency, and can’t wait til tomorrow, you call in to this number, and there’s this spreadsheet that shows the security company, electricians, preferred vendors, etc. for all of those.
And then there’s also lockbox combos, and that’s so we can keep our HOA secure, it’s not something we give out to anybody except a vendor or emergency personnel. And then if a property is FHA approved, the last time their boilers and roofs were serviced, or replaced, etc. So we have pictures of a plumbing stack, so we can help parse through problems that are occurring at two, three in the morning, where and how a line’d be affected, and where the homeowner would be. So, all this type of information is part of that emergency spreadsheet, it’s something that all of our property managers have access to from a remote server, so that we can be of service to our homeowners day and night, and we take the direction from the board members, and then using that direction, help to administer the decisions for the property. A lot of that comes down to me as the property coordinator.
So, thanks for your time, I’m Ben Tryon.