Upgrade Your Community Declarations and ByLaws
This is what we do. We manage property. This means thinking about every aspect of property management that may benefit one of our Associations, the members of the Board of Directors, the Homeowners or even ourselves. One big item that helps everyone is having modern tools to work with.
Help Your Community Members
If you are a board member for an older association, you probably know how older scanned documents can cause headaches. Things just take more time because you can't search your documents for keywords. You're forced to read it all and try and interpret things as best you can. As a volunteer, this usually means doing this after hours when you're already fatigued from daily work or activities with family.
For us here, the Chicagoland area in Illinois has a lot of older associations built in the 60s, 70s and the documents we get are usually difficult to work with. These declarations are a typical example and were created by scanning the original paperwork. You can see how old and yellowed they were at the time.
One of the first things when onboarding a new Association is update these to modern documents.
Benefits of Modern Documents
Original scanned documents are just difficult to read and interpret, generating eye-fatigue quickly. Legal teams charge hundreds of dollars per hour to sort through Community Association governing documents like this. If a board wants to make a change to their bylaws, a legal team will be more expensive just working through an original document like this. It’s simply not what they want to work with. So part of managing costs is making it easier for supporting individuals like legal teams to interpret information.
It’s also more difficult for the board of directors of the community and you, the management company, since this is not searchable. If I want to look up anything about the association rules or how governance happens at this Association, I need to practically read the entire document to make sure I've reviewed the relevant information contained. This takes more time. Mistakes can happen. I like to use CTL+F on the keyboard and type in a few key words and be brought immediately to the clause in the document using that word.
- Searchable using CTL+F - find keywords quickly
- Table of Contents - navigate quickly
- Pleasing to the Eye - easier to read
- Editable Text - easily editable
- Already Converted - legal changes don't start from scratch
In the video above you can see the old vs the new. Much easier to work with!
This is a difficult and tedious process but it’s worth it not only for you but the Association as well. Spending the time once makes a big improvement for everyone involved. Think how many times these documents are referenced as you and the board work through community issues. The new Association declaration or bylaws will be easier, faster to work with, more legible, and should any legal changes need to be made, those changes will no longer cost the Association as much of money, hindering a decision to even move forward with those changes. The modernization of the declaration and bylaws also benefits the owners in the community. They also will reference the bylaws from time to time and will appreciate a modernized declaration.
Are you a community board member in the Chicagoland area of Illinois? If you are in Dupage, Kane, Kendall or Will county, please contact us. If you have any questions or are looking for a Community Association Manager, call us here at PMI Service Group. 630-912-8742
