By Rebecca Zazueta, Windsor Gardens Association 

If you have been a community manager for a condominium association for any length of time, you have learned either by firing squad or through repetition what the preventative maintenance to-dos are for your community.  Most of us have an annual schedule to ensure it all gets done throughout the year.  And if we miss something, inevitably, we will find out the hard way and never let that one to-do slip through the cracks again.  

Later in my career, I learned one of the most crucial tools in preventative maintenance is to involve the owners.  Rather than safeguarding top-secret maintenance details, continuing to fail to meet unattainable expectations, and paying HOA invoices for preventable repairs and emergency calls, I decided to tell owners like it is and to reinforce that they have skin in the game, too.  Condominium living is low maintenance, but it isn’t maintenance-free.  Owners might not like the straight talk we provide, but it is a lot easier and more successful in the long run to manage a community with realistic maintenance expectations and to directly communicate, educate, and remind owners regularly. 

Here are some examples of how to engage owners in preventative maintenance:

Heat Not Working Calls (hot water heat operated by association): Inform owners to check their unit’s thermostat and heat registers before the cold weather arrives to ensure the heat works normally.  Also, be honest about the system design and its limitations.  If the system is only designed to heat the unit to 70 degrees when the outdoor temperature is subzero, tell the owners and remind them annually.  Both steps will alleviate emergency heat calls during severe weather conditions, and if there are repairs to do, you have a better chance of doing them proactively instead of reactively.

Drain Line Backups and Clogs: Educate owners not to use their garbage disposals if they are the consistent culprit of kitchen sink backups.  Let’s face it, people put the craziest things in their garbage disposals, right?  We can talk about misuse, hand out mesh drain covers, and encourage owners to throw their sink debris in the trash.  Also, tell owners not to use hardware store chemicals to clear clogs in their drains because they corrode the pipes and can create bigger, more expensive issues for the HOA-maintained drain line.       

Toilets and Supply Lines: Make an infographic and educate owners to only flush the 3 p’s: pee, poo, and paper.  If your drain lines and plumbing are old, tell them to be kind to the drain line by reducing toilet paper use, flushing multiple times when sitting on the pot to provide a little extra water to help the waste get down the drain, and making sure the toilet paper is saturated before flushing to ensure that it breaks down properly.  

Remind owners to inspect and replace their toilet supply lines every 5 to 7 years, especially if the toilet supply line has a plastic top that attaches to the tank. Braided stainless steel lines with a metal top are a much better option and will reduce the possibility of massive flooding caused by a bad toilet supply line.  

Elevators Out of Service: Inform owners that many elevator challenges are preventable and caused by elevator doors being held open.  If the door is held open by a hand or moving boxes are stacked to block the door sensor, the elevator will time out, and a service call is required to get the elevator back into service.  In most elevators, owners can typically push the open-door button within the elevator cab, which will not result in the time-out occurring.  Most importantly, owners need to know to stop blocking the door when it starts to beep and moves into nudging mode (when the door starts to “nudge” closed).  

Breakdown Cardboard Boxes, Throw Away Plastic Film, and Properly Bag Trash: Prevent overflowing recycling dumpsters and overflow and contamination fees from the recycling hauler by informing owners to break down cardboard boxes, deliver excess moving boxes to an offsite recycling facility if the community dumpsters cannot handle the volume, and throw away or recycle the plastic film separately to avoid contamination.  Trash chutes and dumpsters don’t get spills and smells if owners bag their trash properly, and rodent issues are minimized.  

Rebecca Zazueta, PCAM has been in the HOA industry for 29 years. She is the General Manager of the Windsor Gardens Association in Denver, the largest condominium association in Colorado.  Windsor Gardens is a 60-year-old amenities-based community for residents 55 and older, and Rebecca’s home away from home.