Condo Media - November 2011 - 38

COVER STORY

they are providing necessary oversight, are another common stress point. The constant criticism “can really bring a manager down,” says Gerald Meaney, a vice president at Barkan Management Company. More often than not, the board members who lash out at managers are feeling pressure themselves because their lack of experience with association management makes them insecure, suggests David Abel, CMCA, at

Servidio, CMCA, AMS, principal in Park Place Management in Burlington, Vt. “It’s fine for the first month or two, when everyone is gung-ho. But then, [enthusiasm lags] or someone goes on vacation or there’s an emergency,” and that almost always means more stress for the manager. Managers deal not only with their clients’ financial pressures, but with their own, primary among them, the pressure created by competitors who

and challenging things,” Meaney says. “But you have to deal with the little problems too. It’s all part of the job.”

It Never Ends
Long hours also are part of the job, and another major source of stress. “There aren’t enough hours in the day” is a common refrain for managers who see three new items added to their to-do lists for every one they manage to check off. E-mail, smart phones and other technology solutions have made managers more efficient and more productive, but they have also, arguably, made their jobs more difficult and more stressful. While an e-mail message usually requires less time than a telephone call, Keegan notes, “People send a lot more e-mail messages,” and they send them at all hours of the day and night. The technology that enables managers to respond instantly to questions and concerns also creates the expectation that they will do that, adding another pressure to the list. “If I don’t respond to a message in an hour,” Rivers says, “I’ll get two or three more messages from the same person on the same topic.” A portfolio manager responsible for five or six properties “could easily get 100 e-mails a day,” he adds, and the pressure to respond quickly if not instantly “really takes away from focusing on the job.” To avoid drowning in the e-mail sea, many managers set aside times early in the morning or late at night to respond to messages that accumulate overnight and during the day. This extends an already long workday and threatens to blur the line between work life and home life, if managers allow that to happen. The operative phrase is, “if managers allow it.” Community association managers can’t avoid stress, but they can and must control it. “If you don’t learn to manage the stress,” one industry executive noted, “it’s going to manage you.” The managers interviewed for this article offered a number of suggestions:

Managers also struggle with the financial pressures that weigh on their communities, particularly in the current challenging economic climate.
First Realty Management Corporation in Boston. “These are usually good people who are struggling with issues they don’t fully understand.” But the result is another source of stress for managers. offer rock-bottom prices (and services to match), making it difficult for managers to charge the fees required to deliver the quality services they want to provide. There is also the ever-present concern about losing existing clients — a very real threat in Massachusetts, where state law allows associations to cancel a contract without cause, on 90days’ notice. The knowledge that they could lose clients at any time for any reason can intensify the effort to please, which is itself a major source of stress for many managers. And then there is the workload: immense, unrelenting and at times overwhelming. At the end of the day, whenever that comes, there are always more e-mails to answer, more problems to solve, and multiple assignments requiring attention. It’s not the multitasking that bothers Meaney, who is currently juggling flood damage at one client, fire damage at another and a $4 million renovation project at a third. “I enjoy dealing with big problems,” Meaney says. “It’s the minutiae that can drag you down” — the complaints about someone hanging laundry on a balcony or failing to pick up after their dog. “Putting together loan packages, dealing with insurance claims and power outages — those are interesting

Financial Pressures
Managers also struggle with the financial pressures that weigh on their communities. Those pressures are more problematic in some associations and at some times than others, but they are particularly intense in the current challenging economic climate. Many managers attribute their high blood pressure to boards whose demand for services exceeds, often by several orders of magnitude, the price they are willing to pay for it. Abel notes the “constant pressure to do more with less” in communities that are struggling with tight budgets and collection shortfalls. Some boards, determined to cut costs and avoid dues increases, will start “cutting things out of the contract,” taking on some management tasks, such as scheduling and overseeing the work of vendors, and handling more maintenance and repair tasks themselves instead of hiring professionals to do the work. “This always comes back at you,” says Marian

CONDO MEDIA • NOVEMBER 2011

Condo Media - November 2011

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