FAQs for Home Owners Associations

What is a Home Owners Association, or HOA?

Home Owners Associations, or HOA’s, are legal entities created to ensure common areas are properly maintained. An HOA is also a non-profit organization that manages and maintains amenities such as entrance signage, private parks, boulevards, and landscaping. The City of Calgary is no longer responsible for maintaining these amenities; hence, HOA’s were created to handle the maintenance of your community.

What is involved with an HOA?

There are many features of an HOA, and each HOA is different; however, many HOA’s have these features in common:

A mandatory membership for all property owners within the development;

• Mandatory fees associated with the memberships;
• The authority to enact and enforce maintenance including community design standards; and
• A governing board that has the capacity to hire contractors (including a property management company that handles maintenance and enforcement issues).

We are an HOA that struggles with collecting our fees from our members. Can you help with this?

We understand that revenue collection is a crucial part of your HOA. Emerald Management & Realty Ltd. has strict controls to ensure fees are collected on time. We will work in accordance to the Articles of Association and fee collection policies to collect fees and implement late charges when needed. As a third-party agent experienced in managing challenging situations, we often can resolve issues regarding fee collection easily.

How does my assessment money get spent?

Assessment monies are spent at the discretion of the Board of Directors, who are elected among your peers of property owners.

As an HOA, I want to make the collection of fees easier. What are your payment options?

We allow a variety of payment options to help ensure revenue collection runs as smoothly as possible. We allow the following:

• Post-dated cheques;
• Debit card payments;
• Pre-authorized payment system, allowing contributions to be paid directly from the payee’s bank account to the HOA’s trust account;