Associa CEO John Carona on Why HOAs Succeed or Fail

John Carona, founder and CEO of Associa, the world's largest manager of homeowners associations, sat down with host Justin McKenzie on The Building Texas Show to discuss the origins of his company, the misunderstood role of HOAs, and where community association management is headed next. Carona started the business roughly 18 months out of the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked three jobs to put himself through school. "We started out with just two employees, myself and one rather elderly assistant who I loved dearly," he told McKenzie. "And from that we built this twenty-four thousand employee operation." The growth came "one client at a time," organically at first, and increasingly through acquisition. Associa has now acquired more than 200 separate companies and adds another 25 to 30 management firms in a typical year. Setting the record straight on homeowners associations Much of the episode is aimed at an audience with strong opinions about HOAs. Carona's case for them is a financial one. "The most important thing homeowners associations do is they preserve the value for the owners themselves by adding some degree of conformity, some reasonable rules and regulations," he said, noting that property values in communities with mandatory homeowners associations have been shown repeatedly to grow at a faster rate than those outside them. He also addressed the friction directly. Survey after survey, he said, shows that just north of 95% of residents living in community associations appreciate the experience. "Now, four to five percent out there feel otherwise. And it's our job as a management company to try to address the issues that those four to five percent bring up." Associa now surveys every board of directors it represents three times a year to catch problems early enough to act on them. Technology, training, and a family culture Asked what sets Associa apart, Carona pointed to two things: technology and the amount the company spends each year training its people. "We live in the Amazon age. People want more for less, and there's nothing wrong with that," he said. "That same technological application applies with community associations, and we have to be able to do a better job, a more timely job, and do it for lower dollars." Associa operates 340 branch offices across the United States, ranging from ten to 150 employees, and serves 44 of the 50 states. That footprint, Carona said, gives employees a rare ability to move markets without leaving the company, one reason Associa still employs people with 25, 30, and even 40 years of tenure. Employees have voted the company a national best place to work for nine consecutive years, an achievement Carona singled out above all others: "Nothing makes me prouder than that." Next stop: Europe Associa recently acquired the number two operator in Spain, its first large international purchase, and expects to be the number one operator in that market by the close of December. Carona described it as the opening move in a three-to-five-year rollout across Europe, with the UK, France, and Italy on the list and inbound interest already arriving from Germany. The vocabulary changes by country, as parts of Canada call them stratas, but the work does not. "Whatever they call them, the procedure and the type of service is more or less the same." For homeowners buying into Texas's booming triangle, his closing advice was blunt: scrutinize transportation, scrutinize location, and scrutinize build quality, because Texas does not license builders. "From time to time, bad actors can come on the scene." Listen to this Episode