HOA Websites

We are often asked questions about marketing the HOA both internally to homeowners and externally to prospective buyers. One of the topics that comes up frequently is whether to have a website for the HOA.

A website for your Homeowners Association is a nice to have, but not a must have in most cases. The main purpose of a website for your HOA is to inform and educate homeowners and prospective homeowners. In most cases, a management portal for homeowners will suffice to handle communications, payments, requests and notifications of upcoming events.

If you are thinking about building and maintaining a website, here are some things to consider:

1. Do you have a management portal for your HOA where homeowners pay their bills and submit support requests?

If so, then you may not need a separate website for your community. The additional website would need to be maintained and updated in addition to the management portal. Also, most management portals have their own ability to post notifications to homeowners for upcoming events.

2. Do you have information you want to share regularly with the community? Do you want this information public to people outside of the homeowners?

There may be situations where the information you want to convey is not for public consumption. If you don’t want this information to be public, then we would not recommend having it on a public website.

3. Do you want to market the HOA to show a smooth running board and association?

There are multiple ways to help improve property value through marketing. One of these is to have a website showcasing past community events, amenities, contact forms (to the board), images, and messaging about the community. This is a great way to show off a thriving community. However, it is not necessary to have a website to be able to increase property values and help home sales.

4. Do you own the domain?

In many cases, HOAs do not have their own domain. Purchasing a domain is easy, but it should be done by a member of the board once they’ve made the decision to create a website.

5. Do you know how to build a website?

If you don’t have a website developer or marketer as part of your HOA, you may want to consider using WIX or Squarespace. However, we would recommend that if you are going to be doing email marketing to homeowners to consider Mailchimp. Believe it or not, you may just need a simple landing page that can be supported by Mailchimp. If you are going to use Mailchimp for emails, this may be a viable option to help keep costs down and streamline all of the different marketing platforms for your community.

6. What is the plan or the strategy?

Before you jump into purchasing and building a website for the HOA, make sure to create a strategy for content, a plan on who is responsible for keeping the site updated and most importantly, what should be public vs homeowners only.