Budgeting Painting for Your Home Owner’s Association or Community

You’ve been tasked with managing your Home Owner Association or Community’s tight maintenance budget. It’s a daunting job because many eyes are on you to manage the budget in a manner that pleases many stakeholders and keeps your community or Home Owners Association looking great.

While painting at Home Owner Associations and Condominiums will be the topic of this article, the general principles of budgeting painting maintenance will also be useful for other areas of your community’s capital budget.

Some paint & budgeting tips for Boston-area Homeowner Associations:

1. • The painting should be a considered a routine part of your community’s maintenance because it’s a Capital Expenditure that preserves your community’s value and each owner’s asset.
2. • You don’t need to be ready to paint this year to get a painting quote now. Many Homeowner Associations invite us to quote the painting when they notice the exterior looking tired or the interiors looking dirty or scuffed. Getting us involved early arms the HOA board with painting costs that help them budget the painting projects over a few years. Here’s our exterior painting quiz to see if it might be time to paint your community now or if you can wait longer.
3. • If you don’t know where to start, we can help educate you. We have helped many condominiums and Home Owner Associations with a plan that helps them with their immediate painting needs and future maintenance. For example, this year, we can plan to paint all the mailbox posts in a community. Next year we can stain all of the front porches. And in the third year, we can paint the community’s clubhouse.
4. • Lots of Boston’s Triple-Deckers are HOAs!

     We help our Condominiums, and Home Owner Associations plan the painting of individual homes’ in a cycle. For example, buildings 1-3 are painted in year one, while we paint buildings 4-5 in year two. This way, your painting budget can be stretched further while keeping the interiors and exteriors of your community protected and beautified.

   • We can also paint the street posts, fences, speed bumps, exposed pipes, pool houses, and other items that require painting and maintenance but aren’t always obvious projects for your HOA or Community.
5. • To make sure you are bidding the project out to vendors in an “apples to apples” way, we can help you write the bid specifications so the number of coats, scope of work, and products you’re using are clearly defined for every painting vendor who bids on your HOA’s project. This is a free service we offer that allows you to compare bids easily.
6. • Check out our guide to hiring a Commercial Painter for lots of tips on bidding out your work – it includes all of our best experiences to better arm you with the knowledge to manage your HOA’s budget.

Call us early in the process so we can help you stretch your painting budget:

The best way for us to help you is to get us involved early. All of our consultations are free, since we do this for many Home Owner Associations in the Boston area who are not yet ready to paint, but have questions. We have a lot of experience to share with you.

If you’d like to loop us in, email Paige NeJame at [email protected] and we’ll plan a time to meet either over the phone, via Zoom, or in person.

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You also might like:

How to communicate to your residents when a painting project is in progress.

How a relationship with a Commercial Painter can help you maintain your community better.

How we work with Condominiums, HOAs, Townhouses and Multi-Family Communities.