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Tag Archives: projects

Why Contribute to Reserves?

Board members and Managers often get themselves into a situation where they need to “sell” the value of regular Reserve contributions to their homeowners. It’s often a simple matter of fighting for budget dollars… Reserve contributions don’t keep the lights on, they don’t keep the Association properly insured, and they don’t pay the Management...

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FL: Reserves crucial for disasters, renovations

Now that it’s been been just a short time since a near miss by a very large and angry looking Hurricane Irene, we thought we would talk for a moment about reserves. Reserves are money set aside by associations to deal with large renovation, repair and remediation projects – either from catastrophic events, such as storms, or from the natural aging…

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Recognizing A Failed Reserve Funding Plan

We recently performed a reserve study for a 40-year old condominium association and discovered an all-too-familiar scenario we’ve seen in older projects.  The situation? Huge deferred maintenance obligations that should have been resolved long ago, and an assessment structure that is higher than comparable projects.  

How did this association get to this place? Forty years ago, reserve studies as we know them today were rare.  This association never prepared a complete reserve study.  In­stead, they prepared an annual budget that included reserve calculations for the major reserve categories; roofing, painting, and paving.  The association then created a fixed amount reserve funding plan that fit the “political” assessment climate within the asso­ciation. This was done in the very early years of the association’s existence, but that was not based on any comprehensive analysis of the actual major repair and replace­ment needs of the association.  There was considerable reluctance to raise the assess­ment because this “senior” community consisted primarily of fixed income retirees.

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