Company Name
Common Cents Property Management
Door Count
1,500
Portfolio Type
Associations Mixed Portfolio
Buildium Customer Since
2013
Company Name
Common Cents Property Management
Door Count
1,500
Portfolio Type
Associations Mixed Portfolio
Buildium Customer Since
2013
“If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.”
That’s been Chris DiMarco guiding motto since he started Common Cents Property Management with his business partner more than 20 years ago.
It’s a philosophy that not only helped the company grow to 1,500 units—mostly consisting of HOAs in and around Delaware —over the past two decades, but also one that’s guided their approach to software.
Since 2013, DiMarco has been using Buildium, making use of new features as they roll out to keep his residents happy and clients impressed by the level of service his small team offers.
Some of his biggest wins have been with handling violations and financial reporting, where he’s used Buildium’s customization and automation capabilities to save hours of staff time and offer consistent, easy-to-generate reports for clients.
DiMarco and his partner were both former bankers, so when they went looking for tools to form the backbone of their financial and business operations, they knew generic software wouldn’t cut it.
Without the right tools managing their HOAs was time-consuming and unwieldy. Logging violations and sending out notices required a lot of back and forth communication, with meticulous documenting of each detail. Creating financial reports for clients was equally draining for DiMarco’s team since each document had to be drafted, formatted, and prepped to send individually.
Their main goal was to find a solution that could give more comprehensive support across their business, with purpose-built tools they could customize to help automate their most time consuming processes. This way, their relatively small team could get more done without overextending themselves.
They were wary of overcomplicating operations with a patchwork of different solutions that didn’t align naturally with the way they did business. As DiMarco puts it, “[When you’re] trying to shove something in a square box that came in round packaging, you leave corners. There’s gaps.”
They turned to Buildium early on, as a way to move from calendars, spreadsheets, and traditional email to a platform that could integrate all their regular operations, such as financial reporting, violation management, and handling HOA architectural reviews.
Buildium was able to meet the team at Common Cents’ needs, not just because it had features purpose-built for HOA management, but also because he was able to customize the tools he relied on the most, such as financial reports, and automate tasks to provide better and faster service.
DiMarco has been using Buildium across their business, but there’s two main areas where he’s seen particularly strong results: violation management and client reporting.
Within Buildium, DiMarco’s team is able to customize their violation notices and other forms based on each community’s bylaws and governing documents. They can record specific policies and the corresponding penalties for everything from breaking landscaping rules to installing a pool without approval.
From there, the team can pull those details as a template whenever they need to issue a violation. When conducting an inspection, they can pull up the Buildium mobile app, take pictures, and submit the violation on the spot, or save all the relevant details to finish the process back at the office. Because they can pull up, package, and send all the details they need quickly, it’s easier for the team to stay transparent and responsive to both the homeowner and the HOA board.
“That communication is actually the heartbeat of it, because without that, the homeowner doesn’t really understand what the issue was,” DiMarco says. “There’s really not much for us to do [other] than monitor the situation and click a few buttons.”
More recently, DiMarco has been using batch reporting to save time working with both rental owners and HOAs.
Until recently, his team sent reports out individually, attaching any details and notes to each report before emailing it off. Now, all he has to do is write an intro statement, produce a single batch report for all his rental owners or HOA clients, and schedule it to send automatically on a set date with auto-generated summaries of all the relevant details from the past month.
With minimal effort, he’s able to quickly compile an HOA management packet containing stock reports such as the balance sheet P&L, delinquencies, and vendor ledger and schedule it to send whenever he needs to. The tedious process of drafting 30 pages of reports per community per month now can be completed for all the HOAs on his list with just a few clicks.
One of the earliest, most consistent benefits DiMarco saw when introducing automation and customization through Buildium is a reduced workload for his team.
For violations what was once a “30-to-40-minute process is down to a five-to-eight-minute process,” allowing him to send out notices faster, with even more detail than before.
DiMarco says that batch reporting has saved him “hours of time every month,” for both rental owners and HOA boards. It’s also led to greater consistency and transparency in reporting, which his clients have noticed and appreciated.
“Clients see a repeatable set of circumstances, so they get the same report presented in the same way, in the same order every month,” he says.
DiMarco’s even used Buildium’s customization tools to tweak reports to show month-over-month comparisons, so clients can have a better understanding of their HOA’s performance.
“It definitely makes us better business owners, and it makes our board members and council members more engaged in their business, so they can be better business owners and better financial stewards,” says DiMarco.
Over the next five years, Common Cents has ambitious plans to double the size of its operations with the help of Buildium. “Buildium is easy to learn, easy to use, and has a complete source of tools,” DiMarco says. “We can’t see moving forward and growing without Buildium being a big part of that process.”
To learn more about Buildium’s time-saving customization and automation tools, check out the links below:
