Peer Perspective: Conducting a Maintenance Tour

CONDUCTING A MAINTENANCE TOUR Oh, The Places We Will Go…

Why Conduct a Maintenance Tour?

A maintenance tour – far from a sentimental journey – is an opportunity for homeowners to visit and understand the workings of your HOA buildings that they have never previously realized existed or appreciated.

At our HOA community, a 16-story building with 36 apartments, we have multiple rooms – like the boiler room and the fire protection room – which are never off limits, but which many homeowners have never stepped into, even though they walk past the doors to those rooms on a daily basis.

A maintenance tour provides your residents with the opportunity to obtain a better understanding of your maintenance needs. By connecting the stops on your tour to past, current, and upcoming items in your reserve studies, you provide those on tour with an explanation of how their money has been, is being, and will be spent. This information will hopefully reflect well on thoughtful maintenance activity by a responsible board to ensure the upkeep of your property. Those attending the tour can also become advocates for board activity, for they see the impact of past spending and appreciate the significance associated with current and future spending.

Who Should Lead the Tour?

We have an active maintenance committee, with all six members having served for the last five years on this group, which provides a wonderful consistency for our HOA. Both our residential building and a 6-story separate garage were constructed in 1929, so we find ourselves functioning in a continual maintenance mode, which we recognize is true for many of your HOAs, even those built in modern times.

Any of those members can lead the tour, although in our situation it has always been the chair of that committee. If your HOA does not have a maintenance committee, consider establishing one, as it can be extremely helpful when maintenance obligations occur. Continued on page 20

Preparing for a Stop on the Tour: The Fire Protection Room

The tour should be interesting, informative and move at a comfortable pace. Below is what we discussed on the tour of the fire protection room:

Maintenance Services. We stress the importance of our fire protection services, including monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual, and 5-year testing and inspection.

Standpipes. How the wet and dry standpipes function.

Pull boxes. Note that our fire pull boxes raise an alarm that is local to our building because our 24/7 doorkeepers call the fire department when an alarm sounds.

Residents unable to use fire stairs. Residents who cannot use the very narrow 90-year old fire stairs have asked that their names be posted in this room. In an emergency, fire department personnel can remove the list and visit each apartment listed to find individuals who have sheltered-in-place and help them safely leave the building.

Fire stairs. In our building everyone knows where the fire stairs are located on their floors because the trash and recyclables are collected from that area. However, not everyone knows where the stairs end, because they do not end in a public location. So the tour walks down the last two flights of fire stairs so individuals know where they are when they arrive on the first floor.

Fire inspections. Unannounced government fire inspections occur on a regular basis. The maintenance committee deals with correcting items needing attention such as emergency lighting, signage, removal of flammable material, etc.

Conducting a Maintenance Tour... Continued from page 19

Announcing the Tour

Several days before the tour, which is normally scheduled for late morning on the weekend, we send an email notice to residents and post a notice in our lobby next to homeowners’ mailboxes. Details of the date, day, time, tour leader, and meeting place are provided. In addition, an abbreviated list of the locations we will visit is provided so homeowners know how much walking is expected. Because several of the areas on our tour are at the top of our building, which is reachable only by stairs not the elevator, residents are informed that if they wish they will be able to sit at the bottom of the stairs and await others who venture upwards.

How Often are Tours Held and Who Attends?

We have tours on an informal basis, but roughly once per year. We have approximately 50 people living in our building, and with 3-5 attending each tour, over a period of five years we have roughly 20 different people, or 40 percent of the residents, attending. The most recent tour was half new residents and half residents who had been in the building for over 20 years. The long-term residents indicated enjoyment of the tour, and at the same time were able to contribute a great deal based on their long-time residency.

What Happens On the Tour and What Topics Should Be Covered?

In our building, our first stop is meeting in the lobby at the main elevator. Doing so allows us to talk first about: the extensive attention we pay on obtaining regular service of the elevators; how we deal with even the slightest elevator problem; and even what to do if individuals find themselves stuck in the elevator. We briefly discuss the minor damage on small black marble floor moulding on both sides of the main elevator door.

Attention to elevator operations is certainly in our reserve study, however, fixing the marble is not, and even though people walk by every day they do not notice the problem of the broken moulding. Starting with these two items – one very serious and one not very serious – shows attendees that the committee and board are fully attentive to their safety as a primary concern, but is also attentive to smaller items that can be repaired as part of ongoing maintenance.

We have a wooden floor in our main elevator which is in line for refinishing. This provides an opportunity to discuss why some repairs are so expensive. Although it might be tempting to refinish the floors in the simplest possible way, elevator codes are very restrictive about who can perform any work on elevators. While your HOA may not have elevators, there will no doubt be restrictions on other areas – a common example would be the pool area. These areas provide an opportunity to discuss the complexities of performing some maintenance tasks. Working with your building manager, if you are managed, or speaking with vendors at ECHO presentations, are excellent ways to increase your knowledge of how to obtain needed improvements properly without violating codes or other restrictions.

At that first stop we distribute a two-page

Echo Members: Download

handout that lists locations we will visit on the tour. For each location we include a list of two to ten topics that we want to cover about each tour stop. Completing the tour takes about one to two hours depending on length of the discussion at each stop and the number of questions. Because we are discussing attendees’ homes, typically of interest, it is unusual for anyone to leave the tour before it is completed.

Our HOA has an extensive, active maintenance program. At each stop on the tour we discuss the function of the items visited, the completion of past maintenance and plans for future work.

Conclusion

After conducting a tour, ask members of the community who participated to attend the next board meeting and give a brief summary of what they learned. Their comments should reflect well on the board. Thus, it is important to properly plan and conduct the tour. Done right, the board should be praised in the reports for fiscal responsibility and a refreshing level of transparency. A tour will help establish a sense of trust and confidence in the decisions the board makes.

Oh, the places we’ll go and the knowledge we’ll gain on a properly developed and executed maintenance tour program. It just makes good sense.

Don Beil is a former four-year HOA board member and current five-year maintenance committee chair of a high-rise condominium community in Oakland. He has 46 years of experience as a teacher, primarily teaching computer science at the university level to deaf students. He loves to write and has published widely. He can be reached through the ECHO office.

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a free copy of a Sample Maintenance Manual for Community Associations from the Echo online bookstore!