Every year your condo community and its management learn from mistakes and triumphs that help inform your decisions in the new year. Here we look at the top lessons condo boards learned in 2023 to provide valuable insights that make your board wiser and stronger.

Forensics Help Avoid Future Mistakes

Forensics has become a popular term, applied to all aspects of business and management scenarios. From forensic engineers to accountants, the exploration of failures allows your board to become better at identifying and rectifying building and management deficiencies. As a result, you can find effective remedial measures that prevent future failures. Post-mortems exploring 2023 issues be they financial, community-centric, or structural is one of your most effective predictive tools to safeguard against costly and possibly catastrophic events.

Respect for Your Culture’s Core Values Improves Community

Assessing your community and establishing a culture ensures you conduct yourself in a manner that helps improve your condo’s work and living environments. Creating a strong culture, board and supporting team based on your community’s core values ensures everyone is held to the same standards.

Considering your culture in the hiring and training process and using core values as a measure of performance helps establish a suitable management team. Your board should also conduct itself with respect for your cultural values and ensure all those involved in the care and oversight of the building and, ultimately its residents, do the same. Accountability and a process that allows you to act when team members fail to live up to expectations help promote the importance of respect for your culture.

Following Trends Improves Condo Value

The volatility of the condo market and plans to build hundreds of thousands of new units stresses the importance of monitoring market trends. Your team should identify shifts in residents/buyer preferences to help maintain condo value.

The highly competitive market pits your units and amenities against neighbouring condo properties. Vigilance in property maintenance, helping to control common element fees, keeping common areas modern and attractive, while paying close attention to what the new average resident wants ensures you’re ahead of trends and actively maintain and elevate property values.

Focusing on your board’s role as a major contributor to improving owner ROI includes:

• Improved fiscal management of your reserve fund
• Ongoing monitoring of maintenance to identify savings opportunities
• Appropriate building upgrades that help maximize owner returns
• A goal to achieve longer-term results for upgrades and retrofits

Data-Driven Decisions Improve Resident Satisfaction

Data-driven insights help inform your decisions to improve resident satisfaction. This calls for:

• Ongoing communication through surveys
• Effective community input and comment collection to understand changing sentiments
• Tracking and identifying comment and issue trends
• Using data to streamline property maintenance and request processing

A continuous review of your processes also allows you to create proactive communication strategies such as:

• Online requests response automation
• Automated reminders for common element collection
• Leveraging real-time chatbots to resolve or answer questions regarding common issues
• Keeping residents up to date on your ongoing maintenance and repair schedule

2023 Roundup

2023 taught as the importance of:

• Taking initiative using post-mortem and forensic best practices to improve crises response
• Reflecting on core values of your culture to create a stronger management team and community
• Monitoring trends to identify opportunities to constantly improve property values and owner ROI
• Collecting data to help inform decisions that continuously improve resident satisfaction

As we look towards 2024, your board should embrace these opportunities.

The condo experts at CPO Management Inc, a full-service property management company in Toronto and the GTA, have had tremendous success finding cost efficiencies, developing a sense of community with a stronger management team, increasing condo value, and facilitating responsiveness. Reach out to us today to learn how we can help.