Why HOA Boards Need a Property Manager, Not Just Good Intentions
A San Antonio homeowner recently spent nearly three years fighting her HOA in court — and won. It’s a good reminder of how quickly board disputes can spiral when there’s no professional process behind them.
Elizabeth Luna owned a rental townhome in an 11-unit San Antonio community. The dispute started when the HOA adopted a new rental restriction without following Texas’s legal notice requirements, then escalated when the HOA’s president personally confronted Luna’s tenant over the move-in, and again when the association filed a legal claim that blocked Luna from selling her home. A judge eventually threw out that claim, and this year a Bexar County court ordered the HOA — and its president personally — to pay Luna a combined $33,000-plus in damages and legal fees.
Cases like Luna’s aren’t rare. Board disputes drag on for years, cost tens of thousands in legal fees, and often start over something small: an unclear rule change, an inconsistently enforced restriction, a request nobody responded to. In Texas, the fight is even harder because no state agency oversees HOAs at all — when a board and a homeowner disagree, there’s no referee except a courtroom.
Maine boards aren’t immune to the same pressure points. Most are run by volunteers — neighbors who took on the job because someone had to, not because they signed up to interpret bylaws, chase down bad debt, or defend a fine decision under cross-examination. That’s not a criticism of any board. It’s just not what volunteer service is built for. And when there’s no professional layer between a rule and its enforcement, small disagreements calcify into the kind of multi-year standoffs that make headlines.
Where these disputes actually start
Almost every horror story follows the same pattern:
- A rule gets applied unevenly, or a fine shows up with no clear explanation of how it was calculated.
- Calls and emails go unanswered for weeks, so the homeowner starts assuming bad faith.
- Nobody documents the conversation before both sides dig in.
- What could’ve been a five-minute conversation becomes a legal filing.
None of that requires bad faith on either side. It just requires the absence of a consistent, professional process — someone whose job is to apply the rules the same way every time, document every interaction, and respond before frustration turns into a grievance.
When the rulebook becomes personal
There’s one more ingredient worth naming honestly, because it shows up more often than anyone likes to admit: board members are people, and people bring personalities, histories, and the occasional grudge into the room along with their good intentions. Most board members serve for exactly the right reasons — they care about their community and want to see it thrive. But every so often, the governing documents that are meant to protect everyone’s shared investment get used instead to settle a personal score or reinforce one person’s sense of authority.
It rarely starts that way. A board member with strong opinions enforces a rule a little more strictly against a neighbor they don’t get along with. A committee chair sits on an approval request a few extra weeks to make a point. None of it looks dramatic in the moment, but residents notice, and once a community starts to feel like the rules depend on who you are rather than what you did, trust in the whole board erodes — fairly or not.
The San Antonio case above is a telling example. It wasn’t only the association that ended up owing money — the court held the HOA president personally liable for a share of it, separate from the HOA itself. That’s what happens when a board role starts to feel like personal authority rather than a shared responsibility: the individual, not just the association, ends up carrying the consequences.
A professional manager doesn’t fix personalities, and it isn’t a manager’s place to referee every interpersonal dynamic on a board. But an independent third party applying the same documented standard to every unit, every time, makes it far harder for the rulebook to be used as a lever against any one resident. The rules stay what they were always meant to be: a shared framework for protecting property values and quality of life for everyone, not a tool any single person can pick up.
What a management company actually changes
A professional manager doesn’t replace the board’s authority — the board still sets policy and makes the calls. What changes is everything underneath that:
- Consistent enforcement. Rules and fines get applied the same way to everyone, with a documented basis every time, so no one can credibly claim they were singled out.
- A real paper trail. Every notice, every fine, every response is logged — exactly what protects a board if a dispute ever does escalate.
- Someone who answers the phone. Homeowners get a response within days, not weeks, because there’s staff whose actual job is managing that communication.
- A buffer between neighbors. Disputes get handled by someone outside the social fabric of the community, so they don’t turn into personal feuds between people who’ll still be neighbors next year.
- Compliance expertise. Whether it’s fair housing law, Maine-specific association statutes, or reserve fund requirements, a management company stays current on the rules so the board doesn’t have to become legal experts on the side.
The real cost comparison
Boards sometimes hesitate on management fees because self-managing looks cheaper on paper. But that math rarely holds up once you price in legal fees for even one serious dispute, the hours volunteer board members spend on enforcement instead of their own lives, and the reputational cost when a fight like the San Antonio case ends up in the local news — and, as that case shows, the personal financial risk a board member can carry when a decision crosses the line from policy into overreach. A three-year lawsuit costs more — in money and in goodwill — than years of management fees combined.
The takeaway
The gap between a rule and a lawsuit is process — clear communication, consistent enforcement, and documentation from day one. That’s what a professional management company exists to provide, not by taking power away from the board, but by giving it the structure to exercise that power fairly and defensibly.
Is your board managing this alone?
Foreside has supported condominium and HOA boards across Maine since 1984. We’ll walk through your current process and show you where a management partner closes the gap.