Julie Adamen: 0:00

Realize even you, if you are the president, it's not all up to you. It's up to you to kind of make sure everybody gets things done, or the association is moving in that direction. But you don't have to do it all delegate, and if you don't delegate, you're never going to train the replacement to come up and replace you as president.

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Robert Nordlund: 0:34

Hi. I'm Robert Northland of association reserves,

Julie Adamen: 0:37

and I'm Julie Adamen with Adamen Inc, and this is HOA Insights, where we promote common sense

Robert Nordlund: 0:42

for common areas. Well, welcome to episode number 109 where we're again speaking with management consultant and regular co host, Julie ademan. Today we'll be talking about keeping your cool while under stress, the classic grace under pressure description. Your role at the association is a stressful one, serving without compensation and regularly facing homeowners who don't like what's going on at the association, whether that be assessment increases or rules or even what you're wearing or your haircut. So how do you keep her cool? Last week's episode number 108 featured a great conversation with a truly national class board hero, Jan Newcom. She's from Southern California. She served long at her association, I think, four terms, as I recall, and she served well during that time. She even volunteered for her local Cai chapter and in our leadership role for the National Cai organization. She's a true bright spot for board members, and she sets a very high standard for what a board member can be and what a board member can do. So if you missed that episode or any other prior episodes, take a moment after today's program to listen from our podcast website, Hoa insights.org, or watch our YouTube channel, but better yet, subscribe from any of the major podcast platforms so you don't miss any future episodes. Well, those of you watching on YouTube can see the HOA insights mug that I have, that I got here from our merch store. It features a cartoon that puts a smile on my face. And you can browse through the merch store from our Hoa insights.org website or the link in the show notes, and you'll find that we have some great free stuff there, like board member zoom backgrounds, and we have some specialty items for sale, like the mug that we just showed. So take a moment, look around, find the mug that you'd like and email me at podcast, at reserve study.com, with your name, shipping address and mug choice mentioning episode 109 mug giveaway, and if you're the 10th person to email me, I'll ship that mug to you free of charge. Well, we enjoy hearing from you responding to the issues you're facing at your association. So if you have a hot topic, a crazy story, or a question that you'd like us to address, you can always contact us at 805-203-3130, or email us at podcast at reserves, a.com Today's episode comes from a question submitted by Nick from Denver, who stated, stress is high, finances, rules and homeowners who make life hard. Sound familiar. Anyone? Does anyone serve a second term? And how can I, with a clear conscience, ask someone to replace me. Well, Julie, if not in those exact words, it seems like a common sentiment. So very common. What? What do you say to Nick?

Julie Adamen: 3:31

First of all, Nick, thank you for serving because someone has to do it. I've done it myself numerous times. Probably going to do it again here in the next year or two. So thank you, but I say to Nick a couple of things. One, actually, I would really like to talk to Nick directly and see exactly what is so stressful. But since I can't do that right now, let's just take the normal things that all board members think are stressful, the same things we would. We have a lot of things to do. We're not getting paid for it. You have people coming at you from all sides, meeting homeowners, committee members, sometimes other board members, wanting whether it's a good or bad thing. They kind of want a piece of you. And the next thing, as a board member, you're almost always on, if you know what I mean, it's like, I do a lot of public speaking. Robert does too. So when you go and do a presentation, you got a couple 100 people, or 400 people, whatever it is, you're on, right? You're on. But that doesn't mean you're just on there. You're on from the moment you step into that venue, because people know you and you have to be there. You have to shake hands and talk to people and people, oh my god, I haven't seen you in so long. You have to do all that well over even the course of several hours before and after your talk, or if you're at a conference, it's kind of the same way you're always on and it's exhausting. And I think that so many board members don't know when, or importantly, how, or even if they should turn it off just. Turn off the association noise. So I think maybe that's where we need to go with this. Robert is how to turn that noise off and how to discern what's important and what's not. Go ahead and comment, and then I say, Yeah, well,

Robert Nordlund: 5:12

I was thinking back to my experience, the same kind of thing. There's two paths. I park the car when I own my condo, parked the car, and I walked to my front door. That was one route get settled. Then I walk from my front door to the mailbox and then back to my front door. So there's routes. And I realize I'm Robert Nordlund and I'm the president of the association. I want to smile. I want to represent the association Well, I want to try to spread the aura of I'm a good guy. The rest of the board are good people. We're helping you. How can I do you have any not I'm not saying, Do you have any questions? But I think what I did was I separated those two paths because I needed to prepare myself, yeah, maybe that's it. Because you are, you are a public figure at your association. You're a board member, whether you're carrying a clipboard and you're checking to make sure if the pool service installed a new heater or whatever you're doing as you're walking around, maybe you have a path from your front door to the laundry room you have to be on. But what do you are doing to separate that? Can you just have a smile? You don't need to be taken care of business. Actually, maybe that's what you do. Maybe say hi. Oh, that's great. Hey, I don't have paper with me. Can you email me and I'll I'll look into that. So you're separating and deferring. Is that what you're talking

Julie Adamen: 6:45

about? Yes, actually, that does have something to do with it, right? Because no matter what you do as a board member, you are the public figure, like you just said, and you live there, so you are going to the pool or the tennis courts or the parking lot or whatever you are going to run into homeowners. So I think it's always a good thing to be able to be friendly. It doesn't mean you have to listen to four hours worth of diatribe, but you do have to be friendly. And I think Robert's got the perfect out with that. So here, this is a really good lesson. Just tell them, please email this to me, because then I'll have a record of it, and then if the board needs to address it, we'll be able to do it in an orderly business like fashion, because when things just come to me when I'm walking, I'll forget. You know how that is like you'll forget. And then you just have to be that. People go, okay, they normally do understand that. I think what else I was thinking about? Two things about what happens with board members. One is that, especially if they're newer to being a board member, may have lived in the community a long time, but once you get on the board, you realize there's a lot more going on than you ever thought, that sheer amount of information coming at you and things to learn can be quite overwhelming, and then it, I think when you become overwhelmed with that, you don't know where to start. First, I was telling Robert earlier, right before we came on, Robert and I were talking about a gal. I talked to her probably a year ago or so, I think it's about a year ago, and she was a board member on the East Coast, big Association. She'd never been on the board, but the place was very messed up. And they were in between managers, and they changed management companies, vendors that weren't good. It was just overall a mess in her eyes. But she sounded like she probably had a decent handle on that, but she was absolutely so stressed out that she could basically not function. Even just talking to me, explaining to it she has got tears. I can hear it right, and I'm just like, whoa, girl, take chill, you know, take a deep breath. And I really made her take a deep breath, and I said, you don't have to do everything the first month. I mean, if you are overwhelmed, you're a new board member, you come in, you're overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that hasn't been taken care of, that needs to get taken care of, all these different things that have been a mess or maybe not, you just all of a sudden realize there's so much to do triage that. So you know, the things that really need to be taken care of are life limit money. So if you have a if you realize that the insurance premium hasn't been paid and it's going to be overdue in two days, that needs to be taken care of right away, if that type of thing needs to be done, if it's another life safety issue. You know, they often have the the gates for, like, a big associations, they'll have gates that are closed all the time, except for fire trucks. If you realize all of a sudden those gates don't work at all, even for fire trucks, you got to fix that. I'm kind of stretching on that one, but this is what I'm talking if the spa is 110 you got to fix that, because someone's going to go in and then they're going to sue you. The association didn't get where it is overnight. It may have been 10 or 12 or 15 years getting that way, and you and your current board are the ones who want to kind of come in and fix it. You have to triage that stuff. And if you don't have a community manager or you, or maybe you do, but maybe they're new themselves, because that happens quite often, get some help from a professional on. On How To sort what is important and what's not, how to learn to triage. In HOA world, that could be your Corporate Council, if you're large enough to have one on not on staff, but I mean on retainer, or someone you use, that's really a good place to start. If you have a good community manager or community management company, have their one of their bosses come in, one of the district managers or something, maybe your manager supervisor, if you think the manager can't do it, and to help you triage what that goes on. But I think many of you will find, if you have a community manager, they probably can help you understand what needs to happen and what's important and what's not so, and from there, once you kind of get that, I want to say calendared out. It's not necessarily a calendar, but you have your list. This is first, important. This is second. This is third. It doesn't mean it's, you know, it's stone. If something else comes up, can go in there, in between those things that will, I think, do a lot to take away the stress you feel at being overwhelmed from the sheer volume of information, and your mind going crazy because you realize all of this stuff needs to be done, and you feel like you got to do it now you don't.

Robert Nordlund: 11:08

I'm visualizing that four box image of urgent and important, yep. And was that the Eisenhower matrix or something like that? And just separating things into like you say, getting someone to help you separate. Because maybe you've put the we're going to update the governing documents. Maybe you stall that while you're working on make sure you have the cash flow to pay the insurance premium. Maybe you don't work so fast to get the landscaper replaced, because, you know, that's not an emergency. So identifying what your urgent is from non urgent and important from unimportant. It just is that what you're talking about

Julie Adamen: 11:54

here? Yeah, it's kind of like that, yes. And in fact, it's everything is urgent, but not everything is important. So the important things are up here, urgent is always calling your attention to it just like this. That's the homeowner calling you up and saying the grass is too green, or whatever is go. Actually had someone call call me up one time and tell me that grass is too green way, way back in the day. Hey,

Robert Nordlund: 12:14

I got a I got a phone one I was on a timeshare site inspection, and we're doing the kickoff meeting with the general manager on site. And this was, I'm looking at my map. It was in, you know, Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, and the timeshare owner, knock, knock, knock, knock, barged into our meeting. I have something important. I got to talk to you. I signed up for an ocean view room,

Unknown: 12:41

and all of us thought, this is Tennessee, how, how?

Robert Nordlund: 12:47

What ocean were you hoping to see from timeshare? Yeah, you know, it just but, yeah, you're right. Sometimes it just ridiculous, yeah, and you've got to separate those things out, yeah,

Julie Adamen: 13:00

exactly, exactly. So that's, in fact, that was a that everything's urgent, but not important. I've done, I've done it several times, a program on that. It's based on a saying by gentleman named Charles Hummel. He wrote a book on this, but he actually did it based on the life of Jesus. Because, you know, Jesus did His ministry in three years, three years, only three years to do all of that. So that's because if you reading scripture like he was saying it, Jesus did what was important, not what was urgent. There

Robert Nordlund: 13:29

was people who wanted to get healed, and he said, I'm sorry. I got to move on to the next town, and that was interesting. But

Julie Adamen: 13:37

don't forget, he didn't go, he didn't go to Lazarus aside, while Lazarus was still ill, he waited, because that would have been the urgent thing to do, but the important thing to do was to show people that he could, that he raised Lazarus from the den. So it's just, it was an interesting premise, but I've done several programs on it about about urgent from important. And in our world, in HOA world, board member manager, it's always good to be able to separate urgent. Urgent compels you to do something important. Means it's something you need to do. And being compelled to do something is, is here, you know, and what's important is, up here. Keep it

Robert Nordlund: 14:15

on the list. Don't let it fall off the list, but you'll get to it when you have time. And I think that's especially important for the newer board members, or the board members who are in associations that are struggling. And there are really some associations out there that are struggling, and you see problems everywhere you look. The siding is old. You had some roof leaks last time it rained, the asphalt is crumbling. Oh, gee. The entry gate needs to be fixed again everywhere you look. And that's not even talking about somebody in unit number 13, yep, who is always on your case for not getting things fixed. And they were the one. Well, I don't know if you even know, but you know they there's a lot of people who don't want to increase the homeowner assessments, no pay for all this kind of stuff. So how do you how. How do you rub two nickels and get a quarter? So yeah, we're talking about silly things, but truly, we know that being a board member is stressful, that there's no doubt about that, and it's a hard thing. The weight of the entire association is on your shoulders. You get some help for the manager. I like Julie's idea of not just reaching out to the manager, but to the manager supervisor, not critically, but saying, hey, from your voice of experience, help us navigate forward. How can you, how can you help us separate and have success? They want to retain you as a client, right? Yeah, yep. So they'll bring the horsepower in where they can,

Julie Adamen: 15:38

yeah, and if they absolutely need to, for sure they will because, again, they want to keep you happy, but they also want to save themselves from liability, especially depending on what state you're in. Yeah, so it's always a good thing to reach out to the expert. Again, if you are self managed, you may want to reach out to your attorney, or hire an HOA attorney to help you do some of that type of work. If you have no one else to go to or you could go to a consultant. I mean, I'm not, I do that kind of work, but there are a few other folks out there that do it as well. So there are people out there to help you. You are not alone. You are not alone. Yeah. And you know, on that Robert, I was thinking before we also got on, we were talking about golf, of all things. But you know, I think for board members, because the job can consume you, you can do it eight hours a day, 910, 11, because there's always something to do. Never be done. You'll never be done, right? And that's the same on the management end, that's the same. We always are too. The job is never done, ever. It's it's just a rolling thing of deadlines and tasks for board members. If you are finding yourself not enjoying your life whatsoever because you're so focused on the association, I'm going to counsel you to step back and perform some self care. And I hate that saying, because everybody uses it too much.

Robert Nordlund: 16:47

But I wrote down in my notes here, I felt us going there, yes. I

Julie Adamen: 16:51

mean, should you do these things? Yes, but you're a volunteer. Remember to give yourself part of a break, otherwise you're not going to make it to the end of your term and bring me back that after this is over, Robert, about people not serving their terms out. I've heard some interesting stuff on that. But if you're not going to make it so, you have to meter out your own energy. If you have found yourself, let's just take golf, if you're a golfer, and if you found yourself, you know, not golfing three days a week like you used to. In fact, now you're down to one, and maybe not even that, because you're so busy with the Association. I'm going to tell you it's okay to say, No, I'm not going to be available from two to six. You know, from two o'clock on this afternoon, I'm not available this Take, take your phone, turn it off, put it on silent, or leave it at home. Because I know we can leave home without our phones. People of our age know that because we did it all the time until the early 2000s and all of a sudden, life changed. But go golf, because that kind of golfing is a wonderful thing, because you can't think of anything except golfing. You know, you have to do that. Back when I was I was a large scale manager, so I had a very large Association in Palm Desert, California, and it was a great job, but it was a very, very stressful. Well, at that time, many moons ago, when we were young, my husband and I would say, We sailed two man catamarans competitively. So we sailed a circuit. But I will tell you my job was so stressful, same type of stress you all deal with, so stressful. But when we were sailing, when we were racing, I called it the most stressful, relaxing thing I ever did, because it's going, you're everything's going really fast, but you can only think of this now. You're focusing, you're sailing. You're sailing. Yeah, you know, it's like Schrodinger scat. Does it really exist over there? If I can't see it? Yeah?

Robert Nordlund: 18:34

Well, I'm want to connect this, because, yes, self care is important. And I wrote down history, realize, and you said earlier, the association got itself into this jam over the last 10 or 20 years. And you got to think of it with a momentum factor that like a supertanker, it's going to take miles for a supertanker to turn and so nudge it, push it, push it. But you got to have enough energy to be able to do that, pushing. One other thing is the idea of you are a member of a team. So is that a big part? Also to remember that, hey, I'm not going to deal with the landscaper, Joe or Fred or someone else is going to deal with the landscape, so see yourself as part of a team? Well, of

Julie Adamen: 19:21

course, actually, you all should view yourself as a team, but I'm going to acknowledge the reality is that oftentimes you're on two different teams. Three are on this team and two are on that team. And that can be pretty difficult. However, what I would say that even if you have that kind of you have kind of a two team under the umbrella of the board, divvying up what those some of the responsibilities, and putting people where their strengths are, as opposed to just where you want to stick them, try to do that, and then you all kind of have your own things to focus on. And then it all comes back to the board for decision making, but all of you are supervising a particular area. For example, if you're a CPA, you're probably going to be in charge of the financial end of it. It right? If you are a landscape architect, you're probably going to be in charge of landscaping. So that's which is, those are good things to do, but for boards that are fortunate enough to have almost all of you, or even all of you, if you're really lucky, on, you know, in the same pew, singing from the same hymnal, you're all kind of got each other's back, it can make it a lot more pleasant, but realize even you, if you are the president, it's not all up to you. It's up to you to kind of make sure everybody gets things done or the association is moving in that direction. But you don't have to do it all delegate, and if you don't delegate, you're never going to train the replacement to come up and replace you as president. Oh, and this gentleman, one more thing I was going to say, the gentleman, he said that. He says, How can I What did he exactly say here? He said, How can I, with a clear conscience, ask someone to replace me? Well, that's a really good question. I would say, is that if you are doing some of these things we're trying to talk about, if these are indeed your problems, there are ways to make your job easier. So it's not so bad. I know there's a lot of board members out there who got on the board because someone told them, oh, it only takes a two hours a month because that's the board meeting, and it's just, that's just baloney. It's definitely going to take time. I mean, I sit on my Swim Club board and it takes up more than two hours a month. You know that it's small compared to an association. So if you are able to make your job as easy as you possibly can, easy on yourself by doing some of these simple things, triage, what's in front of you? Delegate to other. That's our delegate. If you're the president, you can but share with other board members and even commiserate with them, if you can, because no one knows your problems like yourself and another board member.

Robert Nordlund: 21:43

Yeah, and I like that idea you talked about going golfing, for some people, that means jumping in the pool, swim some laps, or going to the gym or reading a book or volunteering to be a reader at the local library on the kids kids day, whatever it is you've got to do that to clear your brain and make you a better person for your association. Yeah, I like all that. Well. It's time now to take a quick break to hear from one of our generous sponsors, after which we'll be back with more common sense for common areas. And I want to talk about how to defuse, how to start to minimize, these stresses. So we'll be back in just a moment with more on that

Paige Daniels: 22:22

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Robert Nordlund: 22:53

we're back. Well, Julie, we're talking about the stress that board members face, and it's everywhere. We talked about some strategies to work with the stress that you have, but let's turn the topic a little bit and talk about minimizing that stress. And two words come to my mind. One is defusing it like a bomb, taking its power away, and the other is diffusing it like when you're watering plants, you know you're spreading it around so it's spread it out. Talk to me about those things. Are those effective strategies? Well,

Julie Adamen: 23:26

yeah, they're both effective strategies, because no matter what we this is a people, business, people, people, people, and people are messy. As you know, it's messy, and when you're a board member, you're kind of down in the mess with everybody. You may think you're up here, but you're not. And you know you're in the mess, because you get the calls and the emails, right? So human nature, such as is, especially today, in this day and age, in 2025 I have talked to so many board members and managers and management company executives, and how difficult it is to even find board members and or, or even to get board members to stay on for their whole term, let alone come into another one. So it's a it's it's a really tough time, and I don't envy you, but it, but we have to deal with it, so we know what the fact is. And so how do we deal with that? Well, as as we talk about a lot, I found over lo these many years of doing this, is that probably the biggest problem that associations have that they don't realize they can fix a lot of problems, and they have the tool right there is communication between the board and the homeowners, and I don't mean just at the board meeting, which, for you may only be every other month or every two months or three, I'm sorry, every other month or every quarter. I mean, not everybody meets every month, right? But, but still, even if you do, you don't get everybody there, and you're not really giving enough information. So having a communication strategy and a policy of communication will go a long. Long Way to stopping, to defusing the bomb and diffusing anger, you're actually diffusing, for the most part, ignorance on the part of the homeowners, because they just don't know what's going on. And if they don't know what's going on, and you're not telling them that's a vacuum. And what happens in a vacuum? Robert, nature abhors a vacuum. Nature of whores, of vacuum. So what comes in there is all kinds of rumors and innuendos. It grows exponentially at cocktail time. This is just human nature. It is what it is. So how do we fix that? We have a steady communications policy, almost a drip, drip, drip. If you think it's too much, you're probably doing not enough, but you're probably doing right. So I'm my HOA. I get at least one email a day from things that are going on on. Granted, there's a lot of clubs and things, but there is so much information to be had that people can't really say, Well, I didn't know about that because it's all there. It's either on the website or it's been emailed out. This association is a big one, and once a month they have coffee with the general manager. And so the GM is there, and I can tell you, in the middle of the summer, there's not many of us here, but they're all at that because it's coffee and free donuts. But and they bring in, like, the head of grounds, or the golf superintendent, or they brought in the Pinal county sheriff to start talking about, you know, what's been going on, just people from the community, or whatever, yes, all of that, yeah, and so, and that person will talk and take questions for about an hour, and people come to that they like to know what's going on. So that type of thing would also be, there's a there's a many pronged approach to communication, and it doesn't all have to be via email. It doesn't you can appoint you can. There's a lot of programs text, have, you know what? Just via email? No, it can't be just by email. You also have to have the personal touch in there as well. Some people just want texts you have. That's just a reality, especially people that are under 50, they just soon get a text. They don't want to see an email, because a lot of people don't look at it. Even the younger they are, they don't look at their email. So all of these different there are many solutions to it. And for those of you out there who I can hear you right now talking that I can't write, I don't want to have to write an email and do that, you know, write up some bullet points. You want to say, throw it right into an AI system, chat. GPT. Grok, what's the Microsoft one? Robert, what is that? Co pilot? Co pilot, whatever. Actually, they all do that kind of thing really well, really well, and make sure and read it, proofread it, and boom, there you go.

Robert Nordlund: 27:29

I'm stuck on your idea of communicating in so many ways. I've seen eight and a half by 11 colored pieces of paper with a message on the door from the garage to the lobby. I've seen it right above where you have the buttons for the elevator. I've seen it

Julie Adamen: 27:49

somebody in the elevator, in the elevator. Yeah, I think you have

Robert Nordlund: 27:53

to be careful what you can post in an elevator. But yeah, yeah, you have to do many things. I met a guy at the CAI national conference last year that was had to pass a special assessment at his high rise. And the board recruited one ambassador for every floor to basically speak the the board message that, yes, we have to fix the what was it the balconies? We have to fix the course. Of course, it was balconies. And was it California? No, North Dakota, actually, okay. And they had ambassadors. So every time that Ambassador was going through the elevator, walking a dog, going outside, taking their trash to the trash bin, and they saw someone else, they were the associations ambassador to spread the message that, hey, it's going to be expensive, but you know, what are we going to do? We got to take care of our building, unfortunately. Yeah, we need to pass a special That's

Julie Adamen: 28:48

a wonderful idea. Yeah, that's being creative. About your about your about it. You know, sheer where we are all the all of the home, not communities. Were our associations, one big Association, then there's another, second, big one, but they have units within each one, and I that's what they called, basically a phase build out. But so each phase the unit, there's a unit rep, and there's a deputy unit rep, and they hold block parties and they give you the information needs to go on. So some are better than others, but that's a person that if you have any questions, you call that person and they'll bird dog it for you. So it's pretty interesting. There it. You can be highly creative. And if you're the type of person who's not that creative thinking, someone on your board is get that person thinking about it, you know, or call me. I'll give you a I'll give you some ideas. Off the top of my head, it's not difficult. I just think as a board member, especially this day and age, even if the association is running well, people are difficult. But if things are a bit of a mess and the homeowners aren't happy, and you feel overwhelmed with all of that, you know you get you're in like a trench, and you never, you never stop digging that trench. You're down like this. You. So I would tell you, above all, look up, look out and realize, oh, the sky is blue today. Oh, it was such a nice walk. If I on the golf course, it's quiet. My family loves me, boy, I'm going to buy that. I mean, you have to focus on something besides the association. I would say that during Well, oh, this is so long ago, I'm going to go back to it, but when we had the great market crash in 2008 Yeah, you know when that happened? I mean, people were very I mean, it was bad. It was bad for people. And I wrote a couple of articles about that for managers, actually, about how to get through thinking about these things when you had all this other work to do. First of all, it was hard off the TV, you know, or in our case, now, nowadays, we're just going to turn this thing off, stop looking at things that are that you can't do anything about that took place half world away, and enjoy some small things along the way. Because if you don't, it's you're going to burn out so quickly, and you're going to remain in the ditch. Don't let them cover you up in the ditch, but you're going to remain there.

Robert Nordlund: 31:03

I wrote some more notes down here. And there's whether it's election pressure, every four years in this country, a lot of stress, and then half the people in the country are unhappy. And it's just the way it's going to be. There's COVID, there's so many things, but when you were down in the ditch, I was thinking, how important is it to have your own North Star. Why did I join the board? What am I spending all this time for? Why? Answering that question, why? And for me, forever ago, when I was president of my board, it was so I can maximize my home value, because I was mortgaged up to my eyeballs, and I was doing it selfishly for me and carrying 70 other homeowners along with me. But how important is it to have that North Star that draws you forward? It's

Julie Adamen: 31:51

incredibly important. And I think everyone loses sight of what you just said, because really, people mostly serve on the board because they want to do the right thing. I mean, there are a few nefarious people, obviously, but for the most part, they're trying to do the right thing. And the right thing is to give my time to this community so the community is better. When the community is better, property value goes up. Yep, that's just a fact. It's just a fact. If your association is a mess, don't think that's a secret out there in the rest of the world. When I'm doing I do recruit people who manage on site managers. I recruit and place them as well as part of my business. And they believe me, they all know, even if they're five states away, they know what associations are bad, and it's super if they don't know, they can make maybe a phone call at the most too, and they'll find out everything. So if your association has that reputation, and typically, that's just self inflicted, mostly over people being overwhelmed, people not wanting to put the time in ignorance. And I don't mean ignorance stupid. I mean they just don't know what they should be doing. That's when things start to fall apart and they keep tumbling. Believe me, everybody knows that. And when people are coming to look at your association now to buy, I think that more and more they're looking at a couple of things. One is, do you have anything in reserves? If you are one of these that are way down and nothing in reserves, you can't get a loan, typically, anymore, right? Robert, right, right. Yep, that's a you think about that, folks, if you're associate your condos, especially, I think someone was telling me, this is interesting. I won't mention the association, but you sure know it's in the Coachella Valley in Southern California, big Association, and very well to do very and they never, ever have had a reserve fund, because they have so much money. The people write checks. They just write checks. That's great, until someone wants to come in and finance a purchase. They can't do it. I just had my friend of mine who lives there, her brother in law and sister in law came to look for homes there. They went through that particular association, and they're they, they have money, but they were going to finance. They can't, yeah,

Robert Nordlund: 34:02

well, as much as we want to talk about minimizing the stress, you brought a memory back to me, and that the reason I was able to buy my first condo was that it was a lousy place. I didn't know it, but I could get a piece of California real estate. And quickly was on the board, and I realized that, yeah, there's problems everywhere. But hey, with every there's so many problems I can I can shake a stick and I can solve a problem, and the association will be better, and we as the board can shake a stick at that other problem, and the association will be better. And we measurably made that association better, because it was so easy, there was problems to solve everywhere we looked. We didn't stress about it. We just said, Hey, it's easy pickings. Let's just make this. Is

Julie Adamen: 34:50

it that one bite? How do you eat an elephant? Oh, one bite at a time. That's right. That's right. How about that? So give yourself a break, folks. I mean, give your as a board member. If. Thank you for working so hard, and yes, you will work hard, but you also can give your mind a rest and have your quiet time in the morning, if it's no phone coffee, you and the dog or the cat or your spouse or everybody, and just enjoy that time. Enjoy the way, enjoy things the way you did before you were on the board. That stuff's still out there. You just forget, because there's so much you're so overwhelmed with a lot of this. Granted, a lot of it is negativity, but it's up to you, whether you buy into it or you look out.

Robert Nordlund: 35:29

Yeah, don't let it drag you down. Well, Julie, as always, it's great talking with you. Any closing thoughts to wrap up this episode at this time,

Julie Adamen: 35:38

not so many. Just saying, just tell everybody again. Thanks for serving on the board. It's a highly needed thing. I've done it multiple times. Robert's done it. And we're this is our business, and you think we'd know better, but we do, you know, I because we want to help. It's our expertise, and also it helps my real estate values. So that's what I want to that's the only thing I want to leave everybody

Robert Nordlund: 35:57

with. Yeah, as much as we do it selflessly, it does help you real estate values, and that estate values? Yeah, well, we hope you learned some HOA insights from our discussion today that helps you bring common sense to your common areas. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to bringing many more episodes to you, week after week after week. We're going to be here, and it'll be great to have you join us on a regular basis. Spread the word

Announcer: 36:24

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