The Pros & Cons of Investing in Rental Properties with an HOA

In this episode, we have Katrina Phillips from Investor HOA Services on to explain everything investors should know about investing in properties that are a part of HOAs.  --- Transcript   Tom: Greetings and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. On today's episode, we have one of the most knowledgeable persons I know on HOA. We have Katrina Phillips, who's the founder and CEO of investor HOA services. So are you, you are interested in investing in a property that is in an HOA. This is a great episode to listen to. All right, let's do it.   Theme Song   Tom: Hey, Katrina. Thank you so much for jumping on with us.   Katrina: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me today. It's my favorite topic to discuss.   Tom: Perfect. Well, why don't we go ahead and start, give us a little bit of a background about yourself.   Katrina: So I started in the single family industry back in 2012. Prior to that, I was actually a contractor and had several properties that we bought refurbished and sold. And so I spent about 20 years in construction learning it from every aspect so that I can learn it from. And then I started working with American residential property and really develop their operating platform or was their first hire on their operations team. And people really hadn't done this in the past. The first multifamily, we were able to pull things from, but really we were writing the policies and procedures, the books and utilities and HOA were two things that people hadn't really thought about. It wasn't even a line item on people's profit and loss that they were considering in their, you know, when evaluating investments. And so we really began to build that piece of the process. How does that work? How does, you know, the fact that we own 70% of our properties are in an HOA? How do we interact with them and how does that work? So that's how I kind of got into this side of the business.   Tom: Awesome. It's funny to think about 2012 and I was there too. It was the wild West where, you know, a lot of these companies such as yours and the ones that I was working at was raising a ton of money, buying these houses. And it's just kind of learning as we go and, you know, HOA and utilities, you know, came to be pretty important, parts of the details in doing this at scale.   Katrina: It did. And it was so much fun. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. And, uh, you know, we learned a lot and grew it, and here we are today.   Tom: That's awesome. And you have since gone on to start a new company, right? Why don't you tell us a little bit about your company that you are running right now?   Katrina: So I was actually sitting in a meeting and, um, we were working with a utility provider that function very similarly to what we have structured as well. We actually asked them the question of if they'd like to take on HOA as, you know, as part of their process and has it was becoming a really growing concern and issue and having some pretty significant impact on the bottom line for companies. So they said, absolutely not that they wanted to stick with what they specialize in and that really planted that seed for me. And so that's where investor HOA services came into play, where, you know, we took a singular focus to build an operations platform around that that also integrates pretty seamlessly with other companies, systems and process. I knew I couldn't go in and say, throw away what you're working on right now and use what I'm saying to use. I also knew that we had to get it so that people could kind of go to one place to access information and things that they needed to manage the property. And so that's what we began developing back in 2017 is really an operations platform that can be used in several other areas. We just chose to focus on HOA because we could see it with a growing concern, making bigger and bigger impacts to the bottom line of companies. So we focused in there first, so that is investor HOA services.   Tom: