By James Pfifer, ACCU, Inc. 

I get it, it's early in the adoption of some of the newest technology, and the growing pains are real.

The numbers tell the story. 89% of community managers and 75% of boards now report using HOA software in some form.  The market behind those platforms is projected to grow from $5.6 billion in 2025 to over $9 billion by 2032. We are not in the early stages of a technology discussion anymore. We are squarely in the middle of a transformation. The question is no longer whether to adopt, it is how to adopt thoughtfully.

There are plenty of platforms to choose from = this is not a software comparison. This is a statement about why centralizing communication inside a platform is better for the community, better for the management company, and better for the staff trying to oversee the quality of work.

So much of the communication that takes place for a community is gold. The conversation between a Board and their manager on an important topic, the reason a policy was adopted, the context behind a difficult vendor decision, the history of a dispute that took three years to resolve. All of that institutional knowledge lives inside email inboxes that rarely, if ever, get passed forward when a board seat changes hands.

“If it lives in someone’s inbox, it’s not institutional knowledge.  It’s a liability waiting to happen”

Now contrast that with a well-structured ticketing system. The same conversation happens inside a searchable platform. A future board member, three elections from now, can log-in and understand the context of why that decision was made. The same applies to invoice payment approvals, architectural requests, violation histories, and maintenance records. The community's story is preserved, not buried. And that is what every Board is asking for.  

That is until they are asked to use the system over email, then the real battle begins.  

“I hate your software”

“This technology makes serving on this Board way harder than it needs to be”

“Why are you forcing me to use ‘The System’, my last management company allowed us to use email”

These are all complaints the pioneers in this space are going to have to manage.  It is no different than the pioneers who had to get through using email, it is the same story, just severald decades later. 

Now get this…. Knowledge loss due to staff and board turnover costs organizations an estimated 20% - 30% of annual revenue in retraining, rework, and institutional error.  In HOA Management, that loss is amplified by the volunteer nature of board leadership.

I put that in italic because of its importance.  Not only does the industry have a high rate of manager turnover due to the demands of the job, we have a high rate of Board turnover as well.  If our communication is locked up in all these different email addresses how can we expect to be successful? The hard truth is, we can’t.  As an industry we need to do more to push clients to use the portal. e need to discourage staff from using email and we will see many of the institutional problems starting to decrease over time.  

Here's something I've observed firsthand: board members often say they're overwhelmed and want less involvement. But when you show them a portal where they can log in when they have time, when they choose, and every decision, document, and discussion is waiting for them, something interesting happens. The ones who truly want to be engaged find it even more satisfying. And the ones who genuinely wanted less "always on" exposure finally get it.

The deeper shift is a real one. Being a board member has historically required being available at all times, fielding calls, responding to emails at 10 PM, managing everything manually. Portal-based governance changes that contract. It says … the community runs on a system, not on the personal availability of a few volunteers. That's healthier for boards and produces better decisions.

For all you EOS/Traction users out there, you already know the principle. "If more than one person is responsible, no one is." That maxim was built for organizations running issues lists and rocks, but it applies with equal force to community management.

Picture the classic scenario. A long email is drafted … the entire board is cc'd, the leadership team, the manager, the accounting department, the maintenance coordinator. Everyone reads it and assumes someone else is handling it. The ball drops. The board member follows up, frustrated. The manager scrambles to reconstruct who was supposed to do what. The experience is poor for everyone.

In a ticketing system, each ticket is assigned to a person or job role. The responsibility is explicit and visible. Escalation paths are built in. Deadlines trigger reminders. The question "who owns this?" has a clear, documented answer at every moment. The number of issues that fall through the cracks drops dramatically.

One of the most underappreciated benefits of modern community management platforms is what happens at the edges, the integrations with the other professionals serving your communities.

The CPAs serving community associations, law firms handling collections and covenant enforcement, mailing service providers, insurance agents, reserve study companies, all of these professionals either have direct integrations into the major platforms, or can be given role-specific access levels. What used to require printing a report and emailing a PDF now happens in real time. What used to require a phone call to get current financials now happens because a CPA can log in and pull exactly what they need.

The result is not just efficiency … it's accuracy. When a law firm is working a collection matter, having access to the payment history in the same system that generated the ledger eliminates transcription errors, reduces back-and-forth, and speeds resolution. 

This is one that is genuinely hard to write about right now, and I want to be honest about that, because the honest take is probably more useful to you than the marketing pitch.

All of the AI tools sound extraordinarily strong during a pitch. The demos are impressive. The use cases are compelling. But in practice, in the actual daily operations of a community management company, what we're seeing is that AI is often creating roughly as many problems to solve as it solves when it comes to day-to-day tasks. Not because the technology isn't real. Because we're at halftime of a very long game.

The data backs this up: JLL's 2025 research found that 92% of commercial real estate teams had started piloting AI, yet only 5% reported achieving most of their program goals. That gap between adoption and outcomes is where most of us are living right now.

Where AI has been genuinely, overwhelmingly positive, and I want to be clear about this because it's important, is in AR and AP. The repetitive, high-volume, rules-based work that used to consume enormous staff time… invoice ingestion, coding, approval routing, payment processing, delinquency tracking. AI handles this class of work well because the task is consistent, the rules are clear, and the volume is high enough that the efficiency gains are immediate and measurable.

From data preservation, corporate history transfer, faster workflows, more accuracy, and friendly cross company platform systems, the evolution of software in the HOA space has been largely impactful for a variety of positive reasons.  And to all the men and women out there helping move this needle forward, let me say…. Thank you, keep up the good work.