iMeetings: Why Co-op / Condo Boards Should Embrace Netbooks & iPads
August 13, 2010 — In the cozy town of Aliso Viejo in Orange County, Calif., the five-member board of the community association is looking to buy iPads for its members. A luxury? Not so much as you'd think: The association's board of directors' monthly agenda packets have averaged 1,200 to 2,000 pages each, as the board's general manager told The Orange County Register, and a staff report said that given the cost of collating, printing, shredding and recycling the paper documents, the iPads were projected to pay for themselves within about a year and a half.
You've hard the hype about iPads, no doubt. What exactly are they, and how might they or other sorts of portable platforms like netbooks help a co-op board or condo board work efficiently and save money?
Apple Inc.'s iPad is a 7.5-by-9.5-inch tablet device, a half-inch thick, weighting one-and-a-half pounds. In simplest terms, it's an iPhone with a very big screen – and no phone. Why would you want that? Not owning one, I can't say. It must have a lot to do with the size of the screen, and something about it does feel like the future. Even at a base price of $499,and even in this economy, it's selling – to the reported tune of a million of in its first month. The highly popular iPhone sold only half that in the same time.
Some real-estate professionals have gushed about it, for reasons that translate to co-op and condo boards looking at parts of their buildings on a relatively big iPad or netbook screen. “It is going to be a life changer and a career changer," Lori Snider, co-founder of the Littleton, Colo., real estate branding firm Creativity for Rent., told Multifamily Executive magazine. "Once people realize how they can use this throughout the entirety of their on-site presentations and also leave it in the hands of the consumer, I think it will become the standard across the board.”
Fellow real-estate professional Dhrubo Sircar told the magazine, “It is obviously in the right space, and by that I mean the mobility space. I’m leaving my briefcase behind and …delivering PowerPoint presentations in the boardroom [with it]. It is a game changer…."
Likewise, young building managers, co-op shareholders and condo unit-owners – and by "young" we mean as old as mid-30s – are typically plugged in to mobile devices such as PDAs, smartphones and iPads. They way they use them are a harbinger of how a co-op board or a condo board can do so.
Computer-Savvy Condo
Melissa Rothe, general manager of the Clarendon 1021 condominium in Arlington, Va., told The Washington Post-owned website ExpressNightOut.com, "We're a large building — 419 units — and a lot of owners don't live on-site. So, even though we do the typical elevator fliers about things, the Web helps keep our owners …informed about what's going on. Everyone here has a BlackBerry or iPhone." The condo even has a Facebook group for publicizing social gatherings.
Whether iPad or some other platform will be the on-the-go portable replacement for what now seem like bulky laptop computers is, as with any new technology uncertain. Technology blogger Mark Juleen, dismissing it as an "iFad," has written that, "There is a cool factor right now with these devices, but the cost to replace one outweighs the benefits right now. There are a number of other negatives that I believe will result in these devices collecting dust by 2011 for any early adopters."
What's the takeaway from all this? That paper is passé – see the cover story of the July/August Habitat for a feature on boards going paperless – and that mobile, highly visual and ap-packed devices of some sort will be as ubiquitous as DVDs replacing VHS tapes. Sure, DVDs may someday be replaced by movies saved on mega-memory hard drives, but that doesn't mean you don't embrace the technology that's here now.
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