Breaking Up: The Termination Notice to your HOA or Condo Management Company
Ending Your HOA Management Contract
As the song says, breaking up can be hard to do. In relationships we’ve now devolved from the face-to-face break up to the phone call break up, the break-up letter, the email break up and finally, the lowest form of break up, the text break up. But things are not quite as simple when you are considering they best option for “breaking up” with a service provider for your HOA or Condo community.
So, to break down the breaking-up process for you, today we are going to cover the topic of serving a termination notice to your HOA or Condo Management Company in 2 easy steps.
Follow These 2 Easy Steps
Step 1: Get out your current service agreement and scan down until you get to the termination paragraph. Typically this paragraph states that the agreement can be broken:
a) for any reason with 60-90 day written notice, or
b) immediately if there is a “cause” such as negligence.
Note: If your contract term expired and there is no auto-renewal then you are basically on a month to month term and you can give a 30 day notice.
Step 2: Read the termination paragraph further it may include that you have to provide notice by certified mail. In this case we often have boards that will email a termination notice and in the email say that a formal mailed notice will be forthcoming.
Click Image Below to Download the Template!
Are There Any Exceptions?
Sometimes the management company will let you terminate your contract early if: 1) they want to leave on reasonably good terms to help protect their reputation, or 2) the feeling between your parties is mutual.
So, for example, if the agreement says “90 days” you may be able to negotiate the option to terminate the contract with only 30 days of notice instead.
You may also encounter the instance when the outgoing company does not agree to any concessions – and this is mostly for financial reasons, as they want your income for as long as possible. No harm can come from negotiating however, so we still recommend trying.
To make this break up easier for you we’ve drafted up a termination notice for your Community Manager that you can edit and use – which you can access by clicking the link of the image of the document above.
If you want to learn more about transitioning HOA management companies, we also encourage you to read our blog post The Sequence of Events for Changing HOA or Condo Management or Accounting Companies!
If you would like us to help you with the process, please reach out to us and you will be contacted by a friendly and knowledgeable Community Financials team member shortly!
