Pennsylvania squatters' rights: A 2025 guide for your HOA community

Every community has at least one. You know who they are: the squeaky wheels, the complainers, the busybodies. Difficult residents are a fact of community life. 

Part of your job as a board member is ensuring the safety of residents in your community association. To that end, it’s important to educate homeowners about possible fire risks and the steps they can take to prevent fire hazards in their homes.  Chances are that fire safety isn’t top of mind for residents. However, home fires are more common than most people realize.

At some point, every community association board has to decide how much rental housing to permit within the association.
All too often, the solution usually arises in the form of what is mostly an arbitrary percentage. Yet this simplistic approach ignores the complexities of individual communities and the specific character of your particular residents.

As part of your responsibility to preserve, protect and enhance your community association, you may choose to bring in a professional property management company. Professional management can provide a depth of resources that you may not have access to otherwise, can help you optimize your budget while improving your residents’ lifestyles and more. 

The board members of your community association serve many important leadership functions. Although they may have diverse backgrounds and skill sets, they are all committed to the common goal of bettering your community association, taking actions that ensure its financial health, enhancing property values and improving the lifestyles of the residents. What can happen if you don’t have an effective board treasurer?

As a community association board member, one of your chief responsibilities is to protect the financial interests of your association and your fellow residents. That includes making sure that the association’s reserve and operating funds are carefully managed, protected and invested. Smart decision-making and sound financial stewardship are critical to the association’s long-term financial stability and health. Unfortunately, even the best-intentioned board members may not have the experience or financial knowledge to choose the right banking programs and products to meet their community association’s needs. What should you look for when choosing the best banking program for your association? Read on…

Community associations can be wonderful. They have amenities that otherwise might not be so close to home, like a community pool, fitness center, golf course or riding trails. Being part of a managed community often means having shared interests with your neighbors, imparting a sense of community that isn’t easy to achieve in an ever-transient world. It means that everyone abides by the same high aesthetic standards. But none of that happens without stable finances, including a balanced budget and a well-funded reserve.

The principles to fiscal fitness and physical fitness aren’t that different: Don’t overindulge. Make smart choices. Keeping your community association’s finances healthy requires care and exercising good judgment. Follow our tips to help you do that.

Staffing your community association is both an art and a science. Your community’s culture and lifestyle are supported by the staff you choose, and it’s important to make sure that you’ve got the right people in the right positions, and enough of them. Properly staffing your community goes far beyond having people to answer the phone and handle packages or keep the pool clean and tidy. 

Your reserve fund is what helps your association anticipate its future– and budget for it, too. This fund gives you the power to maintain the quality of your community by allowing for projects that are both necessary and expensive. Needless to say, establishing this fund can get a little complex. But you don’t have to be a fortune teller to read the future of your association, you simply need a good reserve study firm to help. Here’s how you can find one.