Community living comes with lots of rules and regulations – many of which are codified in largely static, hard-to-amend governing documents like proprietary leases and condominium declarations. Others are laid out in the more flexible conte…

While children are most certainly the future, in the present they can often be a bit of a handful. In buildings and associations where residents live in close quarters, it’s inevitable that unit owners without kids will cross paths with the…

Residents in condo, HOA and co-op communities are frequently quite busy. Boards consist of elected volunteers who nearly always have other jobs and lives. So while a professional management company can relieve much of the day-to-day operati…

Community association and co-op boards typically consist of elected volunteers whose job is to serve the best interests of the community in day-to-day decisions both big and small. In an ideal world, every board would live and die by its fi…

Whether in a single-family home or an apartment building, every homeowner has experienced that moment: he or she turns on the kitchen light in the middle of the night to see a huge water bug scurry across the counter, or hear the sound of t…

Unlike in a co-op, wherein residents own shares in a corporation entitling them to occupy their apartment – and in which the co-op board is pretty much the final authority over how the community is run – condos and HOAs are considered ‘real…

Q. I want to know if my condo association is legally registered, because the president of association refuses to show me any documents to verify that we are. Where do I have to ask to get this information?                         —Reside…

Q. Can we include an alternate dispute resolution (ADR) in our co-op’s application itself? Since the applicant is not a shareholder yet, is this legal? If we reject a candidate, we would like to avoid the threat of litigation and use our …

Q. As a condo association in Illinois, do we have a fiduciary duty to hire a property tax attorney in an effort to lower our assessed valuations? If successful, each owner would pay a percentage of the first year’s savings.        —Seeki…

Once upon a time, you usually greeted your neighbor in the hallway of your building as you're coming or going. But lately you haven’t seen or heard a peep from her in almost two months. You wonder if she is okay.   So you ask the super one…