Luddites, Rejoice!

Where co-op and condo boards once thought of e-mail and Skype as strange and exotic, members today regularly use online file-sharing, scheduling apps, automated message systems, and resident-only computer forums. Some are low-cost, some are even free, and this technology is saving boards time, trouble and some serious money.

Consider the three-building condominium complex Woods III, in the Westchester County town of Peekskill. As Hurricane Sandy barreled up the East Coast in October 2012, Woods III board president Robert Sullivan had to alert the residents of all 344 apartments to be prepared. Pronto.

“We didn’t have time to go door to door to tell people to get their furniture off their patios,” recalls Sullivan, a Manhattan attorney. “People in these situations may not think of taking flowerpots off their upper decks, but hurricane winds can turn them into missiles. So we sent out messages with our RNS,” he says, using the abbreviation for a Resident Notification System.

“We found you can do a lot [with it],” Sullivan says. “When we do snow removal, for instance, the residents have to shift their cars out of the way for the snow-removal equipment to go through, so we let them know with an e-mail, a text, a call, or all three,” depending on resident preferences.

The granddaddy of notification systems is the familiar BuildingLink. A web-based property-management platform used in more than 3,000 buildings nationwide, it has 400 customization options for notifying residents about deliveries and homeowner meetings, sending them memos, keeping an archive of building documents, letting residents make maintenance requests and post to online bulletin boards, and much more.

The downside is that BuildingLink can be expensive. “Big buildings use BuildingLink,” says managing agent Carl Borenstein, principal at Veritas Property Management. “Small buildings don’t have the money to avail themselves of that service.”

In the case of Woods III in Westchester, property manager Robert Ferrara, president of Ferrara Management Group, cobbled together a basic RNS that “isn’t a brand name, but is something we do through our office. The technology’s not all us – there are parts of it we get from an outside service” that he declines to name for competitive reasons, since “it took me almost a year-and-a-half trying different options until we found this one that seems to work well for us.”

Brian Scally, vice president and director of management at Garthchester Realty, uses One Call Now in some of his buildings. Using a contact list created manually (or via an imported pre-existing database), this RNS can deliver voice, text, and e-mail messages to specific apartments, groups of apartments, or the entire building. It can deliver messages in a predetermined order, send them immediately, or store them for sending at a later time.

“I can send to certain floors or to certain sections,” Scally says. “So, if I know the A line is going to have a water shut-off, I can record a call and say to those residents, ‘This is Brian. The water is going to be off from 2 to 5 p.m., so please plan accordingly.’ And it will robocall people either on their cell or home phone – whichever they gave me to call – and it will leave a message either with them or their voicemail.”

Ultimately, says Sullivan, having an RNS saves time, paper, and money. “If you wanted to notify people, you had to get someone from the management company to print out flyers and stick them under homeowners’ doors. Or you mailed stuff at 50 cents a pop. So every time you wanted to tell the residents something, it was expensive.”

Compared to traditional elevator or lobby postings, RNS is “more direct and more personable and, so far, the feedback from residents is great,” says Debra Piñon, board president of the 124-unit co-op at 2221 Palmer Avenue in New Rochelle, New York. “They’re getting almost real-time information. Now they don’t have to wait for a letter in the mail or a posting in the elevator that they might not see until they’re going out or coming in.”