I spent last Thursday and Friday in Fort Lauderdale attending the Thirty-Fifth Institute on Condominium and Cluster Developments presented by the University of Miami School of Law.  I’ll be posting future blog entries about several of the topics covered at the Institute but wanted to draw your attention to two items that I think you’ll find interesting:

  • Last week, I received an email from the Community Associations Institute that introduced me to a new term– "HOA Syndrome" and a web site advertising a seminar in a suburb of  Las Vegas (no surprise there!) on how residents can recover monetary damages for the injuries inflicted upon them by community association boards.  You’ll also find on that website a link to a paper by a Professor Gary Solomon that refers to this "HOA Syndrome" as "A Two-Tailed Psychiatric Disorder".  Let’s just say that I was less than impressed with that paper but I’ll look forward to your comments after you’ve taken a look at what Professor Solomon has to say and the HOA Syndrome site.
  • One of my colleagues, Ira Leesfield,wrote an article that appeared in the October 18th edition of the Miami Herald.   There are some very important issues raised in this article and I highly recommend that every ROC manager and board member strongly consider Mr. Leesfield’s suggestion that community associations adopt and implement written policies that prohibit employees using cell phones or other mobile devices for work-related purposes while driving.

The first annual Dowd Whittaker Community Association Festival was lots of fun and a great success and I look forward to speaking at that event next year.  It was very nice to see all of the familiar faces and I hope the board members and managers of the ROCs we work with enjoyed the Festival as much as I did.   Thanks to everyone who attended and participated!

We’re finalizing the dates and locations of our first set of this season’s seminars and I hope to have that information on the blog by the week’s end.