Industry

Developing Practice Tier 1 Recurring Compounder

HOA & Community Management

Community management sells the one thing it cannot staff: manager capacity. The per-door annuity is real; the back office is what caps it.

Per-door recurring fees, contractual relationships, and a service catalog that expands with trust: the anatomy of a compounder — administered, in most firms, by drowning managers and manual process.

Industry research

The economics

70–90% of back-office work automatable Work-order routing, board packets, dues administration — routine, rule-bound work that now runs with a person on the decisions. Violation notices stay human-gated: the statute, not the software, sets that cadence.
97% of executives report manager shortage In the trade association’s own member surveying, the binding constraint is community-manager capacity — which makes released capacity the most sellable artifact in the industry.
Per-door recurring contractual revenue Management fees recur by contract, and ancillary services attach to the same doors — the growth is already inside the book.

FIGURES FROM THE FIRM’S PUBLISHED RESEARCH · SOURCES ON REQUEST · THE 2× PLAYBOOK

Growth opportunities

Where the 2× lives

  1. Back-office automation

    The administrative load that burns managers out — packets, routing, dues, follow-ups — assembles and files itself, with a manager on the decisions. The deliverable is manager hours, returned.

  2. Ancillary attach

    The fastest EBITDA lever in the sector: compliance services, maintenance coordination, and transfer and statement fees attached deliberately to doors already under contract — where state law permits them. Several states now cap those fees; the cap belongs in the portfolio math.

  3. Capacity as the product

    A manager who can carry more communities without degrading service is the scarcest asset in the industry. Firms that manufacture that capacity take share in a market that cannot hire its way out.

  4. Portfolio density

    Geographic and service-mix discipline in which communities the firm takes on — the quiet decision that sets margin for years.

Our perspective

What most firms get wrong

The labor-shortage story

The sector experiences its constraint as a labor shortage and responds with recruiters. But the shortage is partly manufactured: managers spend most of their week on work that does not require a manager. Releasing that time is cheaper than hiring it — and compounds instead of churning.

Where we’d start

Two days inside the managers’ week: every task across two communities classified as judgment or structure, the structure priced for automation, and the doors-per-manager math run for the before and the after.

Put it to us