Most fly-in communities or residential airparks are owned and managed by a homeowners association, usually by a board of directors. Some fly-in communities continue to be managed by the developer or someone the developer appoints.
Are any residential airparks managed by a professional management company? Do some fly-in communities hire a firm to handle the day-to-day chores much like a condominium association might do? Have you heard of any organizations that offer such management services for fly-in communities or residential airparks?
A LWYP subscriber in Texas asks about such companies and if there are some how much do they cost and how is the fee computed?
If you are involved in any such operation or are aware of any, please share the information by posting a comment on our website.
One reply on “Any fly-in communities managed professionally?”
Regarding Professional Management of airparks, I live on an airpark in Florida where a 3 member board of directors decided on their own volition (no vote of the membership) to hire a firm. I believe they got away with this because of the small amount the firm charged to get their feet in the door. What started out at say, $2500 per year, within a couple years became something like ten times that. Not only that, but this company was very zealous, reporting selected code violations to the local county authorities, all presumably with the concurrence of the board of directors. To be fair, the code violations had existed for years in some cases, basically tolerated by those in power who looked the other way and probably by a lot of residents who either didn’t care or didn’t agree with the codes that were violated. There is more to the story (like an attempted complete rewrite of the covenants and by-laws), but sending in hired guns to do the board’s dirty work on top of the firm’s exhorbitant fees caused a rebellion and they were voted out after 2 or 3 years. Since then, the park has been run by its membership again and things go a lot more smoothly, though far from perfectly.
The idea of professional management is appealing. No one has to rat on his neighbor and all residents contribute to the burden of running the park by paying their fair share in dollars, rather than having a few volunteers doing all the work. But it won’t work well if the park has been existence a while, especially if the covenants are loosely written and the scofflaws have been allowed do their own things. Size of the park will also matter, of course, especially if there are no resident volunteers with the right skills to manage.