5 Ways Your Homeowners Association Website Enhances Your Community’s Amenities

Not all that long ago, community amenities combined a big positive (highly marketable neighborhood value) with an equally big negative (a high-maintenance schedule of bulletin board postings, e-mailed updates, sign-up log sheets, and paper payments for add-on features). Although amenities helped attract new residents, they also could create consternation when two community members accidentally managed to reserve the same amenity at the same time for two different events. The results of these inadvertent scheduling conflicts ranged from harried cooperation to outright confrontation, depending on the size, scale and nature of the events themselves. Fortunately, today, HOA administrators like you have better options.

Easy amenity setup

Homeowners association administrators once yearned for an easy way to publicize the features of their amenities without the hassles of makeshift manual methods. With the advantages of a full-featured HOA website, today’s administrators can substitute the ease of online amenity setup for the time-consuming confusion of outdated procedures. There’s one big “if” involved, of course, and that’s the obvious one: Your community’s website must provide these features in the first place, and not all HOA website software providers make amenity support a priority.

At HOAStart, we understand the importance of online amenity management, and we’ve built these features directly into our homeowners association websites. Enter your amenity information into comprehensive but easy-to-use online forms that provide context-sensitive support for extended features. For example, you can add day-of-the week and hour-of-the-day access limitations to any amenity, but the fields that accept this information only appear if you indicate that the amenity isn’t available all the time. Likewise, you can add usage fees, specify the length of an individual reservation, apply minimum-age limits, require customized signup forms, and much more.

Easy reservations

Put away the sign-up clipboard and take your community amenities into the 21st century. Instead of forcing residents to make in-person reservations, or manage the process through a confusing sequence of messages and phone calls, simply add your signup form to your homeowners association website so residents can make their reservations at any time—and from anywhere they have internet access. That digital convenience also puts an end to any possibility of reservation conflict or overlap. Of course, because you can add multiple entries for a single amenity, you also can list large multi-purpose facilities that can accommodate more than one simultaneous reservation.

With a homeowners association website built on the HOAStart software platform, you have access to all these features and more—and that makes amenity management as close to automatic as it can be. We know how much importance your residents place on top-notch community features, so we’ve made it point-and-click easy to manage them, with e-mailed notifications to administrators and residents at each step of the process.

Easy reservation review

Not all amenity reservations are created equal, and for one reason or another, some may not match up with your community’s notion of acceptable events. To simplify the process of sorting out and responding to reservations, you need the ability to screen each one and accept or reject the request without a lengthy game of phone tag. With a full featured homeowners association website, the process of reservation response becomes an integral part of the overall amenity-reservation system.

Again, not all homeowners association website software providers place equal emphasis on these types of features, so before you sign up for a website plan, verify that it offers you the functionality and flexibility you need. Choose HOAStart as your HOA website software provider, and you’re covered: We’ve put these capabilities at the core of our site designs.

Easy reservation payments

Many homeowners association administrators wish they could accept online payments for dues, fees, amenity reservations, and more, but they’re convinced that they’d have to research and integrate this technology themselves. Depending on how—and with whom—you’ve set up your HOA website, you’ll either be stuck integrating this yourself, or left without any option to incorporate it.

Unless you choose HOAStart as your homeowners association website software provider, that is. We’ve built online payment directly into every aspect of homeowners association website functionality that can require it. No need to research providers, negotiate rates, work your way through complex signup procedures, or monitor payments to ensure proper acceptance. The entire process integrates seamlessly into your HOA website, and you can opt to accept credit cards, debit transactions, or both.

Easy view of amenity schedules

Once you’ve set up your community amenities as online-accessible features, simplified the reservation placement process, given yourself an easy review procedure, made online payment a no brainer, and transformed the overall system into one that almost runs itself, what’s left? That’s easy: An online community calendar that clearly shows when each of your amenities is available. Given the ability to block out specific days or dates and times as off limits for amenity reservations, as well as the time slots taken up with residents’ reservations, you want a calendar that makes availability crystal clear.

Just as some homeowners association website software providers downplay the importance of these features or offer only limited access to amenity control, many fail to go the proverbial last mile and display amenity availability on a built-in calendar. Choose HOAStart as your HOA website software provider, however, and you can count on calendar features that support your reservation process—and updates that remind residents of the reservations they’ve made.

Easy, simple, thoughtful, and complete

When you choose an HOA website software provider, you want a partner that understands your needs, prioritizes what really matters to you and your community, and makes it easy to accomplish your administrative goals without cumbersome workarounds. At HOAStart, we make sure that our years of experience in working with homeowners associations show throughout our features, ease of use, cohesive integration, and the care we put into every aspect of site design.

Develop your site with us, and you won’t need to struggle with manual procedures, clumsy processes, or challenging payment acceptance for any aspect of amenity setup and reservations. We provide everything you need to make amenity reservations convenient and easy—for you and your fellow administrators as well as for every resident. And because we offer you a no-strings 30-day free trial, you can test our software for yourself, see what we offer, and find out why we’re confident that our HOA website software is your best choice.