Breaking News: Florida HOA Survey Demolishes Anti-Reform Arguments
September 30, 2008 by Dr. Joyce Starr
Filed under Homeowner Rights
Florida HOA Survey Demolishes Anti-Reform Arguments: You heard it first on Rights Radio.com.
Midnight tonight is a critical time. An important survey of homeowners in Florida HOAs goes on-line.
The survey asked Florida HOA homeowners and non-owners with different roles in those organizations if they were in favor of or opposed to each of 14 proposed reforms to Florida Statute 720 which governs those associations. The well-known Cyber Citizens for Justice, Inc. [CCFJ] sponsored that study.
It’s an important study for several reasons. It’s the first reliable one on the subject with over 1,000 valid responses from all parts of the state. It provides broad and deep coverage of the issues and presents its findings clearly in nontechnical terms.
Perhaps most importantly, CCFJ’s report demolishes the anti-reform arguments so often raised in the past. No one can ever again truthfully assert that reforms aren’t wanted. Nor can opponents of reform honestly claim that HOA owners aren’t willing to pay for an independent agency with enforcement powers to regulate HOAs in Florida. Nor can anyone say with a straight face that only a few vocal malcontents in South Florida want some reforms but everyone else is satisfied with the way their board of directors runs their HOA. This study’s rigorous statistical analysis proved that there’s less the one chance in a billion that any of those claims is correct.
Last week Jan Bergemann, President of CCFJ, shared some highlights from that survey with our Rights Radio audience. (You heard it first on Rights Radio!)
What isn’t well known is that Dr. David Goldenberg, author of one of our best selling books – Creating Home Owner & Condo Association Documents and the author of our best selling special report “Ten Steps to Recall Your Board” – analyzed the data from that survey and wrote the report which appears on-line and is available in hard copy from CCFJ.
Dave’s analysis uncovered a number of interesting facts in addition to those mentioned above or by Jan on last week’s program. For instance, people from all over Florida were strongly in favor of every proposed reform by 75% to 96%! Naturally this result varied by the specific reform and across five sets of respondent traits, namely: Interest or role in the HOA, gender, membership or non-membership in CCFJ, region and whether or not the respondent made a comment or identified which reform was most important to him/her.
Two remarkable outcomes of Dave’s analysis are solid proof that: homeowners views on reform differ significantly from those of their boards of directors and that the directors have a strong and consistent bias against reform. The latter point means that conclusions drawn from prior studies by lobbying groups such as CAI [representing Community Association Managers], and CALL – CAN [representing law firms serving HOA boards] could be open to question on several counts – including the use of undersized samples.
You owe it to yourself to read this important study.
You can access the complete survey here and Jan’s comments on the survey here.
To Your Empowerment!
