Articles

The Power of HOA/Community Portals

Written by Gord Collins | Jun 19, 2024 3:47:34 PM

Is Your HOA/Community Portal Getting the Job Done?

For management staff, it's never fun to rummage through filing cabinets for paperwork related to HOA regulations, resident violations, payments, receipts, architectural requests, maintenance reports, or meeting minutes, and other info. 

And when residents or board members have to come to you to find any of these documents, it makes your workloads heavier and can frustrate them. Fast, available and digital is the theme today for conducting association business and serving residents.

Having a community website built into your community management software is a delightful addition to the platform value proposition for all users. In fact, community portals are an underappreciated, undeveloped resource which if used well, make for better communities, and proves your management is working.

Yes, reluctant laggards avoid developing such dedicated digital resources (other than an account interface) but at some point residents have had enough and demand change.

Fortunately, with ManageCasa™, you can meet their demands for transparency, quick responsiveness, digital payment tools, and online access to their documents and association documents and bylaws.

The Online Resident Portal

Your online portal is a site/account where your residents can log in securely to view documentation, payment records, and make payments. Anytime anywhere access via laptop or smartphone is a benefit that makes residents feel much better about how their HOA is being managed. That's good for you.

This new portal site allows each resident to access public association documents and their own specific account documentation as a resident. 

And of course, residents can make requests, pay dues, learn, comment and participate on open forum discussions, all privately within the software system.

The Online Community Portal

It's the community portal offers a range of benefits for all residents, non-members, and home buyers and residents outside of your communities.  Think of this as more than a publicly accessible website, to provide direct access for members to their own accounts, HOA documentation and your payment platform.

The community portal provides a more transparent context for visitors. It means users feel everybody is looking at the same material, that it's true and reliable and they are confident they know what's going on.  It's a shared experience among all which means everyone is expected to move in tune with what's best for the community.


"A community portal is a web-based platform or website that serves as a central hub for a specific community or group of individuals. It typically provides various resources, tools, and features designed to facilitate communication, collaboration, and engagement within the community."

 It's a fact that all communications are marketing communications. What you present on the community website in news, photos, alerts, and copywriting colors members view's of your value them and your service orientation and competence. 

See the ManageCasa Customer Marketing Website Option

ManageCasa's customer marketing website could act as a community portal. For more rigorous use, you might also have a custom-built community portal.  However, I think you'll discover that the ManageCasa™ client website offers everything you'll need, and it can be custom branded to your community theme. 

With that theme of dedicated service for your community, members and outsiders get the same branded message of competence and value in every message, whether private or public. It's all part of this top-down power management platform to help you optimize your association business and make residents feel good.

To you, it may be your association marketing website, but to residents and the greater communities involved, it's a meeting place online.

Your ManageCasa community website can be a hub for community spirit, announcements.  Residents are more interested in the portal's value to them, not in how you get things done. It can be used for many different purposes with different features, customized to your board's preferences and priorities.

You could enjoy plenty of features and flexibility in providing a community web portal for your residents. The advantages for them may include:

  • quick access to documents 24x7 hours
  • easy payments system
  • easy way to submit architectural requests, photos and other materials
  • mobile access for convenience and immediate responses
  • view amenity booking schedules to book them and pay usage fees
  • schedule of amenities and HOA agenda

Capture the Business Value of Self-Service

What association managers discover about the business value of self-service is that it cuts workloads and time spent responding to resident inquiries and issues. A lot of resident inquiries can be answered via help files and a simple help file system lets them resolve things on their own.

And it's not just downloading work to them, because most homeowners/residents today prefer self-service and self-management tools. They also like fewer emails and intrusive SMS messages too. They view self-service as easier and less time consuming, and it's more responsive to their daily rhythms and time constraints.

It seems like everyone today is on a different schedule. This is how it is and association businesses must adapt to their clients and constituents.

How they Use Community Portals:

  1. payment transactions: let homeowners pay their dues, assessments, and fines quickly online. Automatic billing helps reduce late payment fees too.  It can be a significant cash flow improvement for some HOAs. And those payments are processed immediately in the software's accounting app.  Managers enjoy the real time alerts and reporting. 
  2. community gathering place online: grow the connection to the community by creating a place in it for each resident within a site where all will meet to express and exchange ideas 
  3. helps to increase transparency in HOAs: With all the crimes reported in the last few years by rogue association managers, residents want assurances in financials being available online. Even if they don't know what those financials really reveal, they believe others who do know are monitoring them for problems.
  4. marketing & communications:  aid in communicating the value of the HOA, need for regulations, and to reduce intolerance of other residents views and values.
  5. viewing/participating in association meetings: allows residents to attend/view meetings virtually and respond to polls set up within the resident portal or website.

What's so amazing about ManageCasa's association management platform is that the community portal is integrated into the payments, communication, maintenance, accounting, and publishing system. For association managers, you have full control from your dashboard.

Find out more about launching an HOA or POA in Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina or South Carolina.

An all in one platform is the only way to go when you want to run an association professionally.

ManageCasa™ is the right choice for large community associations because it is everything needed with the robust level services you must rely on. 

Find out everything you need to know now at our community association page now.

Ready to discuss the community association features and whether it fits your needs? Contact our association sales team now at 415 800 1245.