SmartProperty will not only help you create your capital reserve plan, it’ll help you build a better financial strategy to protect your single biggest investment.
Smart Property is a new approach to establishing your assessments while keeping more money in your homeowners’ pockets. As a monthly subscription service, SmartProperty lets you track and update your components so you can anticipate expenditures and come up with the right funding strategy to pay for them. With dynamic forecasting you can compare options to formulate a plan that will make your residents happy while protecting property values.
Like many community associations it is continually challenged with rising costs.
Built in 2001, Trilogy at Glen Ivy is a large-scale active adult community comprised of 1,317 homes in Corona, California that offers world-class amenities. Like many community associations it’s running as its own business with a $4.5 million annual budget and is continually challenged with rising costs, including an increase in the minimum wage, higher vendor costs, and energy costs - especially since it’s 18 years old and has aging components. Trilogy’s water, labor, and landscaping costs comprise 75% of its annual budget. The homeowners have also benefited from a 22% average increase in home values in the past few years.
The board is continually challenged with trying to keep fees low while maintaining high standards, keeping a great community experience, and protecting property values?
The board was caught between battling costs and maintaining the high expectations of the homeowners.
Costs were rising. The board was facing a monthly assessment increase of $15 per homeowner to address a minimum wage increase and vendor contract price increases. This would have upset the community.
Trilogy was able to use the live forecasting and dynamic funding plans to look at ways to reduce the impact of assessment increases while ensuring the long-term financial health of its reserves.
With SmartProperty, Trilogy was able to use the live forecasting and dynamic funding plans to look at ways to reduce the impact of assessment increases while ensuring the long-term financial health of its reserves.
General Manager James Niccoli said, “SmartProperty gave us a tool to develop a strategy that allowed us to look at the entire association’s expenses and budget as a whole.”
Niccoli saw that they could slightly reduce their reserve allocation now while making it up in future years.
With SmartProperty I was able to run scenarios myself, see all the component costs, and really pinpoint the best allocations for the community,” he said. “It was a huge time saver.”
With SmartProperty, the board was able to reduce a monthly fee increase and keep $79,000 in their homeowners pockets while maintaining the financial health of the community.
The board was able able to reduce a monthly fee increase from $15 down to $8. This allowed the homeowners to keep $79,000 in their own pockets while maintaining the financial health of the community. Niccoli said that without SmartProperty and its living database of assets, they wouldn’t have been able to do this.
“Our reserve study has never been so dialed in,” he said. “In 20 years of working in the industry, I have never been more confident with what’s in my reserve study.”
“SmartProperty is a living program that allows me to update components as I go instead of keeping a separate spreadsheet where component details are forgotten, deleted, or lost. Nothing slips through the cracks with SmartProperty.”