Today is National Good Neighbor Day!

In the early 1970's, Mrs. Becky Mattson from Lakeside, Montana recognized the importance of good neighbors, and started the effort to make this a National day. With the help of congressman Mike Mansfield, she succeed in getting three presidents (Nixon, Ford, and Carter)  to issue proclamations, along with numerous governors. 

In 2003, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution, sponsored by Montana Senator Max Baucus, making September 28, National Good Neighbor Day. Previously, this day was celebrated on the fourth Sunday of September.

Note: Rhode Island initiated a  movement to pass a National Neighbor Day on the Sunday before Memorial Day. Action never materialized into a formal national proclamation or law.

New HOA Legislation Update from the Indiana General Assembly

-From the Desk of the Practical HOA Lawyer-     

During the 2010 session of the Indiana General Assembly, a new law was passed limiting HOA regulation of political signs. While most covenants prohibit signs, the new law balances that control with the constitutional freedom of speech.

Beginning July 1, 2010, the law will allow an Owner to display political signs on their own lot or in the window of their home 30 days before an election until 5 days after the election.  The law allows an Association to adopt rules to restrict the number and size of such political signs so long as those rules are distributed to each of the owners.  The law also permits an HOA to remove any signs left out beyond 5 days after an election without notice to the owner.

This law does not authorize the display of political signs on an Association’s common area.  The law also authorizes an HOA to remove a sign that violates the rules provided in the statute or reasonably adopted by the Board. In a condominium community, this law will allow Owners to display signs in their windows and in common area lawns subject to Board approval, which are common area.

If you have questions about this new law or need advice on how to draft sign rules for your community, please contact Jeff Bellamy, The Practical HOA Lawyer, at bellamy@indiana-attorneys.com or through Neighborino at hello@neighborino.com.

Who owns your HOA website?

Since 2007, we've only had two customers leave Neighborino. Our first HOA left last year stating that their new management company would be providing a website as part of the package.

Being a board member and resident in my neighborhood for almost 10 years, I know how HOAs burn through management companies. In the past 10 years, our HOA has been self-managed, managed by 3 different companies, and are back to self-managed (for now). In talking with people in the industry, I learned that HOAs replace their management companies every 3 to 5 years.

The value of signing up directly with Neighborino is that HOAs own their website regardless of management company turnover. You'll never need another website again.

Repeat visitors

In order to keep your residents coming back, it's vital to keep your content fresh, updated and relevant. Over the coming weeks we will be sharing some ideas on how to keep your HOA website active and interesting long after you've entered your calendar events and board meeting notes.

Fresh idea #1: Business spotlight

Virtually every neighborhood has small business owners as residents. Interview your resident business owners and share the information with your neighborhood through your website. Business owners will appreciate the free promotion, and residents will appreciate learning a little more about their neighbors. And doing business with your neighbors just makes good sense. Neighbors trust other neighbors, and your 5-doors-down business owner is likely to treat a fellow neighbor extra well. After all, their paths will cross on a regular basis. Not to mention that when you support a neighbor's business, you are helping sustain your community. The more successful his business, the more he'll be able to maintain and beautify his home. This in-turn keeps your community beautiful and home values high. Everyone wins!

The Practical HOA Lawyer

In Neighborino’s continuing effort to supply our blog readers with relevant and helpful content, we are proud to announce a regular featured column on the Neighborino blog. Attorney Jeff Bellamy will be joining the Neighborino network as a regular contributor to our blog with his column “The Practical HOA Lawyer.” Jeff is an experienced real estate attorney located in Indianapolis, Indiana who regularly counsels HOA Boards, their managers, and developers. Jeff works with HOA’s and Condominium Associations on covenant enforcement, collections, vendor contracting and declaration amendments regularly. If you have a question you would like Jeff to answer on the blog, please send it to hello@neighborino.com.

Question: "Our manager advised us to avoid uploading documents such as the master deed, by-laws, etc. since they say that these can be altered by a homeowner to his own advantage. Is this a legitimate concern, and are there legal ramifications to posting our documents online?"

Answer: While I think your manager has your best interests at heart, I do not agree with the advice you were given.  In this age of Photoshop and other digital imaging software, it is unfortunately more common to see people making the mistake of altering documents and photographs to suit their personal interests.  However, being both a real estate attorney representing HOA’s and their managers and a Board Member myself, I think the slight risk of an owner potentially fabricating evidence is outweighed by the good done when access to documents and information is increased by publishing an Association’s Declarations and By-Laws on-line.

There are no legal ramifications to publishing your governing documents on-line.  Altering documents for an illegal purpose is forgery in Indiana, a felony.  If an owner is brazen (or dumb) enough to commit forgery, publication of your Association’s documents on-line is not going to deter him or her.  What matters most of all is what is recorded in the Office of your County Recorder.  By law, your community’s Declarations should be recorded with your Recorder.  These recorded documents are the definitive documents governing your Association.  By recording them, notice is presumed to be given to all parties regarding the existence of your Declarations.  Therefore, if someone produces an ‘alternate’ version that cannot be reconciled with the recorded originals, that alternate will be disregarded.  For documents that are not normally recorded, such as meeting minutes and corporate by-laws (which are not required to be recorded) there is a presumption that those ‘corporate documents’ that the version that is in the hands of the corporate officers, the HOA’s Board of Directors in this case, is presumed to be valid unless evidence is produced to show that they were altered.  For this reason, diligent record-keeping is a must for an HOA Board.

Using a website can be a great tool for increasing communication between an HOA Board, its management and the Owners in a neighborhood.  A website can accomplish several different functions, such as, notify Owners of annual or special meetings, send payment reminders on assessments, and act as a bulletin board for community activities and news.  It can also serve as a reference resource for important documents, meeting agendas or contact information.   As a word of warning, your manager’s cautious instinct is not misplaced – make sure any documents you publish online are in a format that cannot be downloaded and easily altered, such as a word processing document.  A document that has been ‘scanned’ and creates a static image of the document, rather than a working document that can be easily edited should be used on your website.  Further, working with a trusted service provider such as Neighborino on your web publishing can go a long way on making sure your web based resources are as safe as they can be. For these reasons, I believe the good done by having better communication and access by Owners outweighs the risk that on-line publication might cause.

Thanks for your question and I hope this information helps.

Sincerely Yours,
Jeffrey M. Bellamy
Attorney At Law

Four New Features

We receive a lot of great feedback from our customers. We're very excited to announce the addition of new features that will help HOA's run their website more effectively and help residents connect and communicate with each other.

The most impactful new feature is the addition of forums. Residents can now register for their community website and have access to view and comment on existing topics, or start their own topic of interest within a dedicated forum area. Forums allow neighbors to converse on a variety of subjects, and site administrator’s have the ability to manage the forums and content how they see fit.

Another popular request was the ability to post 'private stories' that are for neighbors only and not viewable to the general public. Website administrators can now simply click “private” when creating a story, and their story will be viewable only to logged in neighbors.

For communities with a variety of documents that need organizing, tagging is now available. Tagging a document groups all similar document types, making it much easier for neighbors to sort and find the document they’re seeking. Website administrators still have control to designate documents as publicly viewable, for residents only, or for board members only.

Lastly, enhancing the photo galleries was accomplished by giving website administrators more control over how the galleries are viewed and participated in. Administrators now have the ability allow or disallow uploads from residents, and can also make the gallery viewable to the public or to neighbors only. They also have the ability to edit photo descriptions and delete photos.

We're committed to listening to our customers and improving our software on a regular basis. Our commitment is to the HOA boards and the communities they serve. Our goal, as a trusted HOA website provider and partner, is to help them better communicate while lessening their workload and the time it takes to manage their website. I believe we took a step in the right direction with these new features.

Neighborino How To: Email entire neighborhood, update website in under 2 minutes

Sending email blasts in Neighborino couldn't be easier, so we wanted to highlight specifically how you would go about sending an email to your neighbors while simultaneously posting the update to your website. We think it's really valuable, and we hope you'll agree.

Check out our 2 minute video on how to do this yourself.

Inspiration from a great Indianapolis neighborhood

Below is a great example of people getting out there and enjoying their neighborhood. After obtaining permission from the IPS school system, Community Heights Neighborhood Organization utilized over 4 acres of land behind IPS School #88 to start a community garden.

The Community Heights Community Garden not only brings neighbors together while contributing to the beautification of the neighborhood, but also promotes healthy living and provides an opportunity to work with community stakeholders.

In addition to areas dedicated to growing pumpkins for all the school children, individual garden plots are available for rent to both members and non-members of the neighborhood.

Community Heights Neighborhood Organization was recently presented the Mayor's Neighborhood Award by Keep Indianapolis Beautiful at the Neighbor Power! Awards Program.

Photos before: IPS School #88 located at 5801 E. 16th Street

Photos after: IPS School #88 located at 5801 E. 16th Street

Now Live: Reorder Board members by title

We implemented a nice little feature that fixed a gap in how our current functionality worked when you wanted to add people to your Neighborhood Board. Previously, you would add neighbors to your Board (President, Vice President, etc.) and it would order the titles on the board alphabetically. Obviously, if you know how Boards work (which we know you do!), the President should be the first on the list regardless of the alphabet!

So, now when you go to your Management section, you can click on "Add Board Members" and reorder the listing for your Board members and put it in the order that best matches your neighborhood.

This will then translate across the entire site.

Below is a video on how to implement this on your own Neighborino site.

Click this image to be taken to the video on how to reorder your Board member listing.We know this is a feature that you'll enjoy to make using the site even easier.

Neighborino is a Product AND Service

There's an incredible amount of web-based products available right now, all promising many great things. However, most of them are missing one key feature...service. Can service be a feature? We believe so. One of the things we at Neighborino pride ourselves on is providing more than just tools and software. We provide a service. While our software was built to get you up and running quickly and easily without technical assistance, we realize there are still some things you may wish to discuss.

What kind of service can we provide in coordination with our product?

The best way to know is to simply send us an email and enagage us in a conversation. How many residents are in your community? Do you have their email addresses? What challenges have you previously faced when trying to engage them? How do you plan to spread the word of your new site? What's the average age of your residents? Paint us a picture and we're likely to have ideas as to how to make your site a glowing success.

Additionally, we can...

1. Build your site for you, from scratch, or we can help you migrate an existing site.
2. Send you a nicely formatted PDF flyer announcing your new site and it's key features that you can copy and distribute.
3. Upload your documents, newsletters and more. Simply email them to us and we'll take care of it.
4. Take photos of your neighborhood if you're in the Indianapolis area.
5. Register your neighbors if you have a list of emails and names, and notify them of their accounts.

Also, if you don't see a feature you'd like, let us know and we'll give you an honest answer as to where it fit's within our plans for Neighborino. It may also already be in development as we are constantly striving to improve our product.

We're very proud of our software, but we're equally proud of our service. Questions? Comments? We would love to hear from you. Email us at hello@neighborino.com. We'll respond.