Prior making those last two announcements, I had started a longer, somewhat related, more thoughtful post. I normally try to avoid multiple posts in one day, but here it is anyway:
One of the wonderful things about living in a building like ours is that you can, for the most part, be as involved or uninvolved in the community around you as you like. It’s very easy to be totally unaware of all the work going on behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly. Even as someone who is currently pretty involved, I’m constantly amazed by just how much is quietly being done by our new management company to effectively address the wide range of issues that dropped in their lap when they took us over a mere 3 months ago. As someone fairly “in the know”—14 years an owner, 9 years running this site, and 5 years on the board—here’s a bit of personal and totally unofficial insight as to where we are and how we got here.
A brief history of our property management since the building’s 1987 conversion to condos:
- Following the first management company(s), Royal Management took over in the early 1990s. Cathy Deloge was the company owner and kept the building on solid financial footing throughout the years. Periodically the Board would take a look at other management companies, but always came back to Royal. Special assessments have been very few and far between—in the almost 14 years I’ve lived here I recall just one, and that was only in the $500 range.
- In November of 2020, following the loss of its office manager, Royal Management joined with Avatar Properties. Cathy continued as our building manager under the Avatar umbrella. She retired from Avatar at the end of 2021.
- As of March 2022, the owner of Avatar retired and Avatar Properties became part of BRIGS, LLC property management. While being skeptical of BRIGS as management, the Board felt that the company should be given an opportunity to prove themselves.
- By the summer of 2022, BRIGS had confirmed some the Board’s worst fears and, after interviewing multiple companies, J A Wood was brought on board. Their stewardship began on November 1st of 2022.
And why have the past several months been so eventful in a not-so-good way?
- In each property management change—3 in 2 years—information was lost, partly due to the switch from paper to digital, partly due to personal knowledge/experience being lost, and partly due to carelessness by prior management.
- Frankly, BRIGS was prone to letting things fall through the cracks.
- Given the 35 years since the building’s conversion, multiple systems are showing their age at once. And not every decision made over the decades that looked sensible and financially sound in the short term has proved quite so wise in the long term.
- COVID put extra burdens on us in several ways: how we meet and interact, how many packages the mailroom must handle, how quickly parts for repairs can be obtained, how available contractors are, and how many bids are offered for work to be done.
- We’ve had two extreme weather events in the past few months—the Nor’easter just before Christmas and the past weekend’s record-breaking windchills—that have impacted huge numbers of buildings, some of them far worse than they did ours.
I know that with so much going on, it can seem like this issue or that is being overlooked, and tempting to place blame for problems on the most convenient target, current management, but those of us working closely with them have been struck by how much they’ve had to deal with and how well the’ve done it. Even Ron, who’s been doing maintenance in the building since its conversion, says that when he and his vast store of knowledge eventually leave us, we need to hang onto J A Wood because they “really know their stuff.” I, for one, am convinced that they are the company that will get us back on track and help the property thrive as we move forward.
Except when it comes to the front elevator. Every person I speak with, whether it’s the owner of JA Wood, certain Board Members, and even Ron just look at me like I have 3 heads when I say the door isn’t right and that someone will soon get stuck in the elevator. “People get stuck in elevators” is what I got as a response from a Board Member, no less. All just shrug their shoulders like nothing else can be done. Now I’ve lived here for 30 years and I KNOW how this elevator behaves. The door has never been this slow in that amount of time. But yet when I inquire about it, all I get is that it is ‘within spec’ and the situation is being monitored. Yet the door continues to malfunction. Yesterday the door was stuck on the 5th floor for over an hour. Well, I’m sick and tired of being blow off. Yes, I don’t know all the behind the scenes of what’s going on. But I do know that the elevator door is NOT ‘within spec’ I could not be more disappointed with our new management company, the Board, and Ron for not wanting the elevator door repaired properly.
It’s not that management and the Board wouldn’t like that elevator door to operate the way it used to—they’ve been looking into the best way to make that happen—it’s that only so many things can be done at once, plus our former elevator company has been swallowed up by a bigger, more impersonal one. Improving elevator action and reliability is definitely on the to-do list around here; it just isn’t the single most urgent item.
More shrugging of shoulders . . . I get it. Pass the buck. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that’s how I feel.
With my limited knowledge of the situation, I have been impressed by how the current management company has taken ownership of the problems caused by this weekend’s weather and already has cleanup crews onsite.
I am curious, do we know how many units have had to deal with flooding / water damage in the last year?
I definitely appreciate all the hard work that goes into running and maintaining a building like this. and I am glad we have Ron and a management company that folks feel good about. But every time something like this goes wrong, it is to varying degrees something everyone in the affected units has to deal with. I think we can recognize that people are working hard and maybe doing a good job helping respond to these building-wide emergencies while also recognizing that too many of these emergencies are happening.
To the point about elevators, they aren’t the single most urgent item on the priority list because right now one of them is still working (though I agree with Curtis I think the added load it is under is causing some pretty rapid wear and tear). The minute it breaks, we are going to find we have another emergency to deal with.
In a word, I appreciate how well a lot of these folks are reacting to these events. But it does feel like the pro-active side of building maintenance is not working very well and a lot of residents are bearing the cost for that.
I totally agree with everything you’re saying, and my heart goes out to everyone who’s been more directly impacted by these problems than I personally have.
I can’t speak for the board (I’m wearing my “web admin” hat here which makes anything I say unofficial) but it may be reassuring for folks to hear that the Board compiled a spreadsheet a few months back of items that they wanted to work with the new management to address BEFORE they became urgent. In other words, steps have been, and continue to be, taken to be more proactive and less reactive. J A Wood has been working on several of those items—making plans, looking at costs, arranging repairs, etc.—but our two recent extreme weather events turned a couple of those items into immediate emergencies. And the emergencies instantly take priority and pull resources away from other things.
Our property suffered under the months of unfocused management last year. I’m so sorry for the effect that has had on too many people. I believe we’re on the right path now and will be able to get ahead of things again over the coming months, but that doesn’t make it any easier for those affected right now.
If it’s any comfort, an awful lot of people in a lot of buildings are dealing with water damage right now. The plumbers who arrived around 5:00pm yesterday to tackle bursting pipes in our building had already been working since 3:00am at other properties with the same problem.
Is there going to be a meeting between owners, board members, and management after the latest round of crises in our building has been resolved to have a chance to discuss what concrete steps are being taken to address the issues?
I talked with Eileen two weeks ago to find out when the next board meeting was, but she didn’t have an answer.
A notice should be going out this morning to owners about the next board meeting. Sorry it didn’t get sent out sooner—as board secretary I’ll take the blame for not seeing that that happened earlier.
I agree with the admin here that the board has been taking proactive steps, and getting new, responsible management was the first step and the most important. In the short time we were with Brigs (not our choice, as admin pointed out in their post) they performed terribly, and we quickly undertook the process of vetting and interviewing capable companies. Brigs would never have responded the way JA Wood is responding now. Never not ever. We’d be so much further into the muck. The issues are multiple, and there is no quick fix. These are problems that no single person has the capacity to fix on their own. Sudden urgent crises only compound and stress already aging infrastructure–and some of these crises, like flushing unflushable things or not leaving water running during a deep freeze as instructed by management, are only preventable by residents themselves.
Management has been, and is, literally working around the clock to respond. They deserve some basic respect and unfortunately, residents are taking their anger out on them with harassing phone calls, flooding the portal with bogus work orders, and more childish behavior–all in a weird effort, it seems, to derail management from tackling the emergencies. Who knows why or what pleasure they are getting from this. But this literally gets in the way of solving emergencies and only costs everyone more money.
Management companies can, in fact, fire associations if residents and boards prove too contrarian to work with! What would we do then? Who among us would be here at 5am, arranging machinery to clean out the garage or assembling teams of plumbers? Right now is a tough time, and nothing will happen as fast as everyone wants it and in the order that everyone wants it, but management is here doing the hard work. We really do need to work together, respectfully and with grace, to solve these problems that are affecting everyone.