How Data Analytics Transforms HOA Operations & Relationships

As an HOA management company, enhancing the operations of the communities under your care and building strong community relationships is at the heart of what you do. But without measuring current efforts, it’s hard to make changes that positively impact your internal processes and deliver the level of service your clients expect. That’s where data analytics comes into play.

This article explores how data analytics empowers you to move beyond numbers, making informed decisions with a people-centric focus. From community engagement to maintenance trends, these insights transform how communities are managed, ensuring they thrive under your care.

How data can revolutionize your community management operations

Data analytics empowers you to make informed choices, streamline operations, and enhance community living experiences.

In this guide, we’ve broken down data analytics into two main categories: 1) For your company 2) For the communities you manage.

Use our table of contents below to navigate the topics you’re most interested in.

Your Company:

Improve Client Services & Build Better Relationships
Propel business growth
Easily Convey the Value You Provide to Boards
Improve team productivity & staffing decisions

The Communities You Manage

Communication Effectiveness
Maintenance Trends
Security Incident & Resident Dispute Patterns
Common Rule Violations
Architectural Changes & Design Trends
RFP Management Trends
Resident Support Trends

Data Analytics for Your Company

1) Improve Client Services & Build Better Relationships

Knowing how satisfied your board members and residents are is key to delivering services that go beyond their expectations. A client survey can help you gain valuable insights into how your boards and residents perceive your company. Taking positive actions on their feedback will naturally lead to stronger loyalty and retention.

Consider creating separate surveys for board members and residents with questions that cater to their individual experiences.

Survey questions for board members:

How effectively does the management company communicate with the board regarding community matters and updates?
How responsive is the management company to requests and concerns the board raises?
How satisfied are you with the communication and handling of common area maintenance?
How satisfied are you with the management’s use of technology to manage community operations and resident communications?
How would you rate the professionalism and expertise the management company’s staff demonstrated?
What made you choose our management company over other alternatives?

Survey questions for residents:

How likely are you to recommend our management services to another association?
How effectively does our management company communicate important community updates and announcements?
Are you satisfied with the maintenance and upkeep of common areas, landscaping, and amenities?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how well do you think the management company’s services are contributing to maintaining or increasing property values?
How responsive is the management company to your requests and concerns?
How would you rate the availability of management company staff for addressing resident needs?
How satisfied are you with enforcing community policies regarding noise, parking, and other regulations by the management company?

Pilera enables management companies to create surveys and gain valuable feedback from board members and residents. Some ways that you can utilize Pilera’s surveys include:

Create a survey at a community or company level.
Include custom questions in the form of ratings, drop-down questions, open-ended questions, and more to get the information you need.
Get a secure link to the survey to distribute to board members and residents through our powerful communication solution.
Track message delivery and email replies related to your survey communications.

2) Propel Business Growth

According to studies, 60-70% of all community associations are managed by property and HOA management companies. With 8,000 new associations forming each year, the demand for HOA management services is increasing, and competition is becoming fierce. To identify areas for growth, make sure your software provides actionable business analytics to retain existing clients and attract new business.

Pilera’s Ticket Analytics Report can give you big-picture insights into your company’s operations. This report provides an aggregated view of all tickets your company is managing across your entire portfolio, including work orders, violations, incident logs, support, ACRs, RFPs, and more. This report allows you to identify which communities require the most attention from your team and even justify your pricing structure over time.

3) Easily Convey the Value You Provide to Boards

As a management company, one of your challenges is effectively conveying the value you provide to boards. It can be frustrating when you constantly receive questions from board members questioning the value of your services.

Data analytics tools can help you easily demonstrate the value you bring to the table without any doubts or guesswork. Imagine being able to present clear and compelling reports to the board, highlighting key insights.

Pilera’s Ticket Analytics Report enables you to communicate the value your company brings in a way boards will easily understand and appreciate. By showcasing how you proactively address community needs and resolve issues, you can create long-term relationships over time.

Within Pilera, managers can also generate a professional-looking PDF summarizing all the work they have completed for the community during a certain time frame. Board Members love this report!

4) Improve Team Productivity & Staffing Decisions

Limited staffing, high turnover rates, and lack of technology implementation can have a negative impact on your team’s productivity. This can lead to employees feeling overwhelmed and compromised service quality for your clients.

However, by utilizing HOA software that automates your team’s workflow and provides analytics on workload, your team can increase productivity, deliver exceptional client services, and feel rewarded for their efforts.

Through Pilera’s Ticket Analytics Report, company executives can gain valuable insights into employee performance and workload management. This report provides a comprehensive breakdown of all ticket types and closed, open, and assigned tickets by employees. By analyzing these metrics, executives can make informed decisions about staffing needs. They can identify if employees are on track or overwhelmed with work and then allocate resources to improve the team’s efficiency. This data gives you a better idea of whether you need to hire additional community managers.

Data Analytics for the Communities You Manage

1) Analyze Your Communication Efforts

Communication is vital to the overall well-being and success of your communities. It’s the foundation of good community engagement, whether you are sharing maintenance schedules, notifying residents of emergencies, distributing newsletters, or inviting residents to community events. However, many communities struggle with understanding the impact of their communication efforts and whether they’re hitting the mark with residents.

Analyzing your communication efforts can help you identify shortcomings and successes in your strategy, ensuring residents are engaged and well-informed.

Here’s how you can evaluate and improve your communication strategies with Pilera:

Delivery Analytics – Pilera provides detailed delivery analytics for each announcement you send to your community. This includes confirmation of email delivery or replies, text message delivery, and details on whether a resident answered a phone call or if it went to voicemail. These analytics help you understand if you’re reaching residents effectively.
Communication Usage Report – This report gives insights into the number of communications sent per community. With this data, you can identify communities communicating effectively and those needing to increase their communication efforts to inform residents better.

2) Work Order Trends

Maintenance plays a vital role in ensuring the upkeep and safety of a community. Yet, community management teams often face challenges such as lost work orders, employee burnout, record-keeping, and evaluating vendor performance. Analyzing maintenance data within your HOA software tool can provide valuable insights to address these challenges and improve maintenance operations.

Pilera offers innovative solutions to enhance maintenance operations through data analytics:

Work Order Trends

In each community, you can use the work order dashboard and visual charts to analyze trends over time, including the ratio of open versus closed tickets, work order categories, status breakdowns, and assignment distribution. These insights help identify common maintenance issues and how work orders are progressing.

Workload

For each community, you can see a breakdown of work orders assigned to various staff members. This breakdown helps identify overwhelmed staff members and opportunities to redistribute tasks so everyone can perform at their best.

Backlog

Pilera sends a monthly automated report of stale work orders that have not been worked on in 30 days.

Vendor Performance

The work order dashboard in Pilera enables you to filter by a vendor company or specific vendor company staff member to see open/closed work order trends and monitor workload.

3) Identify Patterns in Security Incidents & Resident Disputes

Analyzing data on security incidents and resident disputes can help enhance safety measures and overall harmony.

With data analytics in your HOA management software, you can identify areas of concern and improve security measures, ensuring a safer living environment for residents.

It’s also important to track resident complaints and disputes so you can identify recurring issues, implement preventative measures, and make the resolution process easier for your team.

Pilera’s Incident Management feature (formerly Activity Logs) empowers managers to monitor incidents and resident interactions at the unit and occupant levels. Easily categorize various types of incidents and utilize the dashboard to filter through data. The dashboard enables you to pinpoint which incidents are most common and take a proactive approach to foster safer communities.

Similar to work order insights, managers can gain the following insights on incidents and resident interactions:

The trend of open and resolved incident tickets over time.
A breakdown of incidents and resident interactions by priority.
A breakdown of incidents by category, so you know which type of issues are most common.
A breakdown of incident logs assigned to managers lets you see who is overwhelmed and can redistribute tasks effectively.

4) Common Rule Violations

Ensuring that residents follow the rules in the community’s governing documents is important to preserving property values, enhancing public appeal, and fostering harmony. However, some community managers struggle to ensure compliance is met, especially if residents aren’t aware of the rules or are resistant to them.

By gathering data analytics on rule violations within your community, you can take proactive steps to improve compliance and educate residents about the importance of following the rules. Examples of analytics that you can gather in Pilera include:

See which categories of rule violations are most common in each community.
Repeat offenders of community rule violations
Breakdown of rule violations assigned to staff members
A breakdown of open versus resolved rule violations.

For instance, if the most common violations are displays outside homes (such as flags or decorations), you can implement proactive measures to educate and remind residents about the rules and why they’re important. This can be achieved through automated communications, such as emails or texts, dedicated pages on the community website outlining the rules, or informative knowledge base articles on the topic. You can track the effectiveness of your efforts over time by seeing whether the display violations are still common or have been reduced.

5) Architectural Compliance and Design Trends

Boosting property value through home improvement projects is a common goal for residents. However, it’s crucial to ensure that these projects align with your community’s rules. By staying updated on the architectural changes that your communities are requesting the most, you can provide residents with valuable guidance. When managed effectively, ACRs have the power to enhance curb appeal and attract potential homeowners.

To improve the ACR approval process, managers can view data on:

The trend approved and rejected ACRs over time.
A breakdown of ACRs by category so you can understand the most popular types of home improvements and provide tips to residents on improving their property value.
The type of ACRs that are rejected the most enables you to provide guidance to residents on compliance and how to submit accurate ACRs.
A breakdown of ACR approvals by priority.
A breakdown of ACRs assigned to managers, board members, or committees.

6) RFP Management

Managing the Request for Proposal (RFP) process is important to ensure you get clear scopes for community projects, ultimately leading to selecting the vendor that best aligns with your needs.

However, managers often face challenges in determining which vendors to invite to submit bids for an RFP. Limited time and resources can also prevent thorough analysis of RFP proposals, potentially causing important details to be overlooked.

Pilera’s RFP management tool empowers you to gather vital data to enhance your bid process:

Accepted/Rejected Vendors – In Pilera, you can filter the dashboard to view a list of all vendors who have been accepted or rejected for each category. This information allows you to consider inviting successful vendors from past RFPs to participate in future ones or reassess previously rejected vendors to determine if they merit another invitation.
Employee Workload – Pilera’s intuitive dashboard and visual charts enable you to monitor the workload of employees responsible for evaluating RFPs within your company. If certain staff members are overwhelmed, you can efficiently redistribute RFPs to other team members. By balancing the workload, you ensure that your team has ample time to thoroughly review RFPs, thereby avoiding the risk of overlooking critical details in the proposals.
License Expiration Notifications – Reminders about when a vendor’s license expires can also aid in important decisions about which vendors to invite or consider for your RFP.

7) Resident Support

Exceptional customer service is the driving force behind successful HOA management businesses. It not only enhances board and resident satisfaction but also strengthens community connections. Today, residents also seek instant answers and rely on their management company to provide prompt and dependable support.

Support analytics can help give you insights into support request trends and staff workload, so you can allocate resources more effectively to resolve your residents’ requests.

Here are some ways Pilera helps you understand resident support efforts:

Trends – Learn about the most common issues residents report, so you can take proactive steps to prevent or help residents resolve them.
Open vs Closed – A breakdown of open versus closed support tickets over time.
Priority – A breakdown of support tickets by priority so you’ll know what needs to be addressed immediately.
Employee Workload – A breakdown of support tickets by managers so you can distribute workload effectively.

Transforming Data into Stronger Community Connections

Data analytics in HOA management is not just about crunching numbers. When interpreted well, you can use data to improve the operations of the communities under your care and contribute to better living experiences. Every aspect of community operations, from communications to maintenance to customer support, can give you insights to build stronger relationships, drive growth, and improve productivity.

About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management software that has helped thousands of community managers enhance communications, operations, client support, engagement, and voting. Book a personalized demo to learn how Pilera can help improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Beyond Numbers: How Data Analytics Transforms HOA Community Relationships