The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Danbury company’s website to offer closer look at homeowner associations
Danbury startup AssociationNation is offering to help people get behind the gates of private homeowner associations and their communities.
The goal is to help potential buyers looking for amenities that standalone houses might not include, whether shared services like landscaping and plowing or perks like clubhouses and pools.
Like Zillow and Realtor.com, AssociationNation allows people to plug in criteria for their home to get a tailored list to peruse. AssociationNation also includes homeowner association restrictions and existing residents’ preferences — for instance, not having owners who might rent their place to tenants or limitations on the types of pets allowed.
Founder Art Stueck considered a homeowner association ratings system, before jettisoning that idea in favor of the general information portal AssociationNation is developing.
“There is no site that you can go to today and learn about all of the community associations in Connecticut — and there’s over 5,000 of them,” Stueck said. “The vast majority of communities don’t have a website — even for their own purposes.”
Stueck runs REI Property Management in Danbury, which provides a range of services to homeowner associations in its client base that have thousands of units in western Connecticut.
Stueck hired Sacred Heart University graduate Sean McVey to build the AssociationNation website. Stueck’s son Sam handles marketing.
Buyers, brokers, attorneys and others researching information on private home associations can find dead ends. While municipalities include condos and townhomes in their property records, those records can exclude details on assets that might enhance the value of units in the eyes of buyers.
Southbury’s massive Heritage Village Master Association is one example of a community with a website with portions accessible to outsiders. Heritage Village outsources its website design and maintenance to HOA Sites, an Indianapolis company that has built other websites in Connecticut — and nationally — that are largely password protected to ensure resident privacy but provide house hunters little information.
A condominium association in Hamden is among those with no website but is a top result of a Google search. The complex was built 40 years ago with perks like a small clubhouse, pool and easy access to downtown Hamden’s main retail drag and the Merritt Parkway that might appeal to prospective buyers.
But the Vision Appraisal property records service used by Hamden does not include the private road that complex residents list as their address for postal purposes. Only by entering numerical addresses of the avenue fronting the complex are those units dredged up from the database. Even Zillow does not calculate its “Zestimate” for some residences there, stating insufficient information is available to approximate a value.
“If a listing comes on for a condominium association, you might have questions: ‘How many pets can I have? Can I have a pickup truck? Can I have three cars? Am I able to put in a charging device for my electric vehicle?’ ” said Michael Barbaro, president of the SmartMLS multiple listing service based in Wallingford that aggregates real estate data for brokers.
“What happens is something comes on the market, and people and Realtors alike start to bombard the association or their representation — often a management company — who I’m sure are already busy and having
to answer the same questions multiple times.”
The owner of the Dow Della Valle brokerage in Hamden said, however, that good brokers stay in touch with associations for any updates and are prepared to field buyers’ queries on association options in the regions they cover. Tyler Della Valle noted condo boards’ turnover, creating the potential problem of differing views on the value of having a website with details readily available.
“I don’t know how apt an association would be to share their information,” Della Valle said. “People are rather reluctant in sharing anything more than they absolutely need to.”
Stueck says AssociationNation is doing the legwork that he believes will enhance the value of condos and townhomes by allowing buyers to search for available listings according to the criteria they value.
But it will take the cooperation of homeowner associations, with AssociationNation reaching out to them as it adds them to its database in hopes they
will provide those details.
“We have to figure out ways to get boards to say, ‘We’ll do this.’ That is a big part of our challenge,”
Stueck said. “We are saying, ‘Listen, if you establish a community profile, it becomes your website.’ ... Whatever you want to
put there, free.”
it’s there for