Most HOA Maintenance Operations Still Run on Email Threads and Spreadsheets. That's Starting to Change.

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

22 Jul 2026

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The HOA and condominium sector manages trillions of dollars in aging infrastructure across the United States, according to Sally Hamidi, Founder & CEO of ON Property Technologies. Yet the maintenance operations supporting those assets remain stitched together with email chains, spreadsheets, and phone calls. This setup leaves board members making fiduciary decisions without real-time data and property managers spending hours coordinating a single emergency repair.

The gap is familiar to anyone who has served on a board or managed a community. What’s less visible from outside the industry is how fragmented the technology landscape remains even among communities that have adopted digital tools. Management systems exist for compliance tracking, bid distribution, vendor management, and financial reporting, but they rarely connect. The result is siloed applications that replicate the same manual coordination problems they were supposed to eliminate.

Emergency Ticket Costs

Hamidi spent 15 years running her own HOA management company before pivoting to an executive role at a national maintenance and construction business overseeing a large HOA portfolio. In both settings, she saw the same operational failures.

“An emergency comes up, pipe bursts in the basement,” she says. “You have to hang up that phone call and call as many people as you can to address this emergency. Someone might be available, someone might not. Did it get done? I have no idea.”

The result is hours consumed by a single maintenance ticket, not because the repair is complex, but because no coordination layer exists. When information does come back from a vendor, the manager must relay it manually to the resident who reported the issue.

For homeowners paying HOA fees, this inefficiency translates into slower response times on urgent repairs and management companies stretched too thin to be proactive about preventive maintenance.

Automation Alone Doesn’t Fit

The obstacle isn’t a lack of software; it’s that maintenance coordination in this sector has to operate inside existing governance structures, and most digital tools weren’t built with those structures in mind. Many associations maintain preferred vendor lists built on years of relationship and trust. Others operate under not-to-exceed spending thresholds that require board approval before a repair can proceed past a certain dollar amount.

Hamidi says an early attempt at full automation made the constraint concrete: a system that dispatched work without accounting for vendor preferences ended up routing a job to a company one manager specifically did not want on the property. “It ended up being a vendor that they absolutely did not want to work with,” she says. “They were on their kill list.”

The broader point, in her view, is that maintenance technology in this space has to leave room for human judgment rather than override it. Spending approvals and vendor relationships are governance decisions, not just workflow steps – and technology that ignores that distinction creates new problems instead of solving old ones. “Human decision making is always going to trump a machine making decisions for you,” Hamidi says.

The Adoption Barrier

A persistent assumption in the industry holds that maintenance technology is difficult to adopt, or that existing pen-and-paper and phone-based processes are adequate for the stakes involved. Hamidi disputes both. “The common misconception in this industry is that it’s very difficult to use, or our system right now works well,” she says. “I can assure you it absolutely doesn’t.”

That gap between perception and reality matters because it shapes how slowly the sector modernizes. Many vendors in this space have run their businesses, scheduling, invoicing, and team coordination entirely on paper, not because digital tools are unusable but because nothing suited to how trade work actually happens has reached them yet.

What’s Still Missing

Even communities with the most current maintenance tools still face a gap between property inspections and repair execution. Defects identified during a walkthrough typically require a manager to manually convert findings into a work order after the fact. This step introduces delay and lost detail between the moment a problem is spotted and the moment it’s addressed.

For board members serving in a fiduciary capacity, the practical consequence is that decisions about maintenance spending often rely on outdated or incomplete information, because no direct pipeline exists between inspection and execution in most communities. “People need to make data-driven decisions now,” Hamidi says. “When you can’t come up with data to inform your decisions in minutes, not in days or months, you are exposing your association to outdated ways of doing business.”

ON Property Technologies is one company among several working to modernize community association operations. The underlying condition driving all of them is the same: an industry managing enormous shared financial exposure with coordination tools that predate the scale of what they’re now responsible for.

About the Expert: Sally Hamidi is Founder and CEO of ON Property Technologies, with 15 years of prior experience running her own HOA management company and a subsequent executive role overseeing a large HOA portfolio at a national maintenance and construction business.

This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.