HOAleader.com - Tip of the Week - May 16, 2025
Published: Fri, 05/16/25
Updated: Wed, 05/21/25
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HOAleader.com - Tip of the Week - May 16, 2025
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In this week's tip, we try to figure out what a board member online meant when they asked if condos or HOAs could change their existing assessment allocation.
As you likely well know, usually assessments are calculated according to each owner's percentage of ownership. Your documents say that so-and-so owns 1 percent of the community, another person owns 2 percent, and so on. Then when assessment payments or special assessments are due, the total amount is divided based on those percentages.
Could you, as a board, work to change those percentages?
Well, it's possible our reader means one of two things. Alex Argento, Dania, Fla.,-based senior vice president and head of southeast operations at AKAM, who manages about 100 associations totaling 40,000 units in south Florida, read this question to mean this person is simply asking about how to change the amount the association is assessing owners under its current budget.
“I was unsure, but I took from this question is that the board member is asking about changing the monthly HOA fee,” he says. “Speaking about the south Florida market, we've seen a lot of communities that have struggled with skyrocketing insurance prices or needing to do projects to satisfy the new statutes for structural maintenance and repairs.
“Their HOA budgets that they've typically escalated maybe 3 to 5 percent a year don't cover those costs,” he explains. “So they end up in the middle of the year with big issues paying for things like insurance and the like.
“You can't change assessment allocations easily because they're typically based on percentage ownership,” says Argento. “A building's square footage, once it's built, is built. You'd have to either take away or add square footage to someone's unit, which isn't happening. But you can amend your budget here in Florida. That's possible to cover extraordinary costs. So we do now see associations looking not just to special assess but also to change their budget and their assessments to cover these increased costs.”
Argento also touched on the other question this board member might have been asking about: If an owner is deemed under your documents to own, say, 4 percent of your community, when could and would you seek to amend that to, say, 3 percent or 5 percent?
Find out why that's oh, so difficult in our new article: https://www.hoaleader.com/members/5095.cfm
Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President
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