Everything You Need to Know About Your Co-op / Condo Property Manager

Our findings appear in a series of five charts available in print in the January issue of Habitat as well as in our online digital edition (with the survey viewable to subscribers only, though others can sample the first 25 pages of our other content for free). There you'll find comprehensive charts of:

• Who's Managing What and Where
• Fees and Extra Charges
• Manager Salaries, Gender and Other Stats
• Board Business: Budgeting and Communication
• Resident Business: Fees of Ownership

About 6 percent of the buildings covered here changed management companies in the past year. Each manager oversees, on average, 5.7 buildings. Seventy-five percent of management principals actually manage buildings. Sixty percent are male. Firms have been in business for as few as four years and as many as 85.

Annual minimums per building can be as low as $9,000 to $12,000 — plus loads of per-item fees, though some low-cost companies actually include a lot built in to their annual charge — to as high as $45,000 by two companies — both of whom also have loads of per-item fees!

You'll see which three companies

allow residents no electronic

payment whatsoever,

insisting on paper checks.

Some include capital-improvement project management as part of their fee, like one of the two top-end firms mentioned above — though the other one does charge for that, on a sliding scale.

To give you an accurate picture of each company's size and resources, one chart lists the number of full-time staff and the average entry-level and senior-level salaries, plus what benefits they offer to employees.

You'll also which methods of management / board communication you and your peers are using: phone, e-mail, texting and face-to-face. And among our other findings, you'll see which three companies allow no electronic payment whatsoever, insisting on paper checks.

The more we look at these charts ourselves, the more we're convinced that if a board's proceeding without these objective facts and knowledge, you're flying blind. You're not being robbed blind, presumably, but, y'know, whether you're totally blind or legally blind, you still shouldn't be driving.

Click here to see a list of participating management companies.

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