Shelter Management Group strongly believes that every homeowners association should develop and maintain a common area maintenance plan. Maintenance plans can be used as a guideline for timely repairs and maintenance to common areas and should be updated regularly as certain common area components age. The biggest aid for keeping and/or creating a maintenance plan for community managers and board members is the Reserve Study.
Nevada law requires that all homeowner associations have a full reserve study conducted at least once every five years. Ref. NRS 116.3115
The Importance of Common Area Maintenance
The cost factor is one of the biggest to have a regular maintenance program for your homeowners association. As a community ages, components begin to fail. The importance of developing and executing a routine maintenance plan for common area components is quite simple … Cost! Maintaining common area components as they age, rather than once they have completely failed will save the association countless amounts of money in the long run.
Consider this when developing a common area maintenance plan:
- To maintain common areas in a way that will protect and enhance the values of the properties within the community
- Maintaining common areas properly as they age will likely minimize the liability of the association
- Often times encourages owners within the community to properly maintain their own property
- Preventative maintenance will always cost less than deferred maintenance or total replacement due to complete lack of maintenance
- Community assets wear out faster due to high levels of usage
- Lack of common area maintenance may cause internal issues to private property such as roof maintenance in a condominium or townhouse community … failure to maintain a roof that is the associations’ responsibility may cause leaks and ultimately may damage the internal components of an owners unit.
Types of Common Area Maintenance:
- Reactive: “Run it until it breaks” method is the most commonly used method of maintenance and is the most costly of all maintenance types.
- Preventative: actions done on a schedule that detect, preclude or mitigate component failures with the intent to prolong the useful life of a component.
- Predictive: common area maintenance based on the actual condition of the component
- Proactive Maintenance: Combines both preventative and predictive maintenance methods by pinpointing the precise problems. This can also be combined with advanced installation and repair techniques, which may including potential equipment redesign or modification to avoid or eliminate problems from occurring in the future. This method is not commonly used in common interest communities but is the most cost effective method.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact a member of the Shelter Management Group (SMG) team, we would be happy to help! Contact us at 702 – 818 – 4780 or info @ smghoa.com
Article Authored By: Jamie Collins, Supervising CAM, CMCA, AMS agent at Shelter Management Group (SMG)