Condo/HOA FAQs

Online through the owner portal, by check, by credit card, or by automatic deduction from your checking account (ACH). We do not accept cash.

Owner portal and online payment

Statements are in the owner portal. If you would rather not use it, call 253-267-8788 or email support@kallescm.com and we will send one.

Typically general maintenance of the common areas, landscaping of those areas, capital expenditures, management fees, annual tax preparation, street and exterior building utilities, garbage collection, and the association’s insurance policy.

What is included varies by association, and some cover more. Your association’s budget is the accurate answer for your community, and your manager can send it.

Because otherwise volunteers do it. We collect dues, pay the association’s bills, produce monthly financial statements, watch compliance with the governing documents, help build the annual budget, run meeting notices and packets, keep the records, support the reserve study, coordinate landscaping and vendors, and handle tax and audit work with the association’s CPA. There is also someone reachable around the clock for an emergency.

The point is that owners call us instead of calling a board member at home. The full scope is published here.

Protecting and maintaining the common property, and making the decisions that keep the association solvent and the community worth living in. The board sets direction and approves spending. We carry it out.

Owners are the voting members and they establish the rules. The elected board carries them out on the owners’ behalf, with the manager’s help. We do not enforce on our own initiative, and letters go out only once the board has approved them.

Read your own governing documents first, then the current budget and the most recent reserve study. Those three tell you most of what you need.

Community Associations Institute publishes good primers for new board members. caionline.org. Your manager will also sit down and walk you through how your association actually runs.

You can expect the community’s cooperation, your own privacy respected, and access to training. You are responsible for knowing the governing documents, showing up to meetings, applying the rules evenly rather than selectively, building a budget that reflects reality, and staying engaged with owners.

Applying the rules evenly is the one that causes the most trouble when it slips.

They are in your association’s owner portal. You can also ask your community manager by phone or email and we will send them.

Yes. Fill out an ACC form, which is the architectural control committee request, and send it to your community manager. The board has to approve it before work starts.

Starting first and asking later is how owners end up being told to undo something at their own cost, so it is worth the wait.

Send it to us by email or through the portal rather than to a board member directly. We log it and put it on the agenda for the next monthly meeting, where the board addresses it. That way it is on record and handled the same way as anyone else’s.

You can vote, attend meetings, and expect to be treated the same as every other owner. You are responsible for paying your dues, maintaining your property to the association’s rules, and voting in elections and on association business. The last one matters more than most owners think, because quorum is what lets the association act at all.

A form of residential ownership that comes with mandatory obligations: financial responsibilities and rules that exist to keep the common areas maintained, preserve how the community looks, and protect what the homes in it are worth. Buying in means agreeing to them.

Come to meetings and vote. Introduce yourself to the people near you. Treat neighbours the way you would want to be treated when it is your fence or your dog. And if you have the energy for it, organise something: a barbecue, a block party, a fundraiser, or a seminar the association would find useful. Communities where owners know each other need far fewer letters.