Your monthly assessment goes to your condominium association and covers that association’s own maintenance and operating expenses. The separate annual assessment goes to the Wood Lake Residents Association, which owns and maintains the amenities and common grounds shared across the Wood Lake communities — the pool, clubhouse, lakes, tennis courts, playgrounds, entrance sign, and common landscaping. Both are billed and payable through your Resident Center account.
Category: pay-wg26
When are payments considered late, and what is the late fee?
Your payments are due on the first of the month and are considered late if not received by the 14th. A late fee is applied on the 15th for any account that has not paid in full. The first time an account becomes late, the fee is $50. If the account remains past due and a further late fee is applied the following month, that fee is $100, and it stays at $100 for each additional month the balance remains past due. Once the balance is brought current, the fee returns to $50 the next time an account becomes late.
My account shows a balance from our community’s previous property management company. Do I need to pay them? Do I no longer owe it since they aren’t the management anymore?
As a homeowner, you never owe money to a management company, whether it’s our company or the previous management company. You owe your association. The management company, whether the prior management or us, is simply the way the money gets from Point A to Point B.
As an example, think of buying a product on eBay. You may use PayPal to complete the purchase, but you are paying the seller for the product. You don’t pay PayPal. PayPal just handles taking the money from you and providing it to the seller. As property management, we serve a similar function of collecting the money from you and depositing it to the association’s bank account.
If your account shows a prior balance, you do still owe the amount. You should not and can not send that money to the previous management, as they are no longer affiliated with your association. You should make that payment to our company, even if the balance originated prior to our involvement. And a change of management has no bearing on the amounts owed.
I am a contractor or vendor that did work or supplied materials for the community, and I want to know why I haven’t been paid?
To determine with certainty, email us at service[AT]ajenning.com. Replace [AT] with the @ symbol when emailing. Don’t contact the property manager, as they may not know the reason. By contacting our general service email, multiple employees involved in this process will see it and can research it. If the property manager is the reason your payment is delayed, we will discuss that internally.
We pay vendors and contractors exceptionally fast here for a property management company. While you may be used to Net 30 terms or beyond when working for our competitors, it’s rare any invoice doesn’t get paid within 30 days here. There are a few common reasons this occurs.
One reason is if our client expressed dissatisfaction with the work, although you would have likely heard from the property manager if this was the case.
The next most common reason is USPS may have lost your check or it may be delayed. If you contact us we can trace this and place a stop payment and reissue if needed. Payments are issued out of Las Vegas, Carol Stream, IL or Charlotte, depending on which of these cities is geographically closest to the destination address. Some payments are sent from Boston regardless of geographic location, but this is rare and more commonly reserved for when we need to refund homeowners for overpayments, as this is a different platform. Over 99% of the payments we issue as accounts payable for services and goods rendered come from one of the three locations via our accounts payable processing partner.
The less common reason is that you have an electronic payment arrangement with our accounts payable partner where you have asked them to pay you via ACH to your business checking account or provide you with a virtual credit card number to process via your in-house credit card system. Please note that the processor we use, AvidXchange Strongroom, is very much an industry-standard service. Many of our competitors also use this service. If you set up to receive electronic payments through one of our competitors, AvidXchange Strongroom considers that a direct relationship with you regardless of which property management company issues the payment. If you set this up based on your work with another management company, it will apply to all other management companies, including ours, that use this software. We can not opt you out of this service if this is what happened. You must contact AvidXchange Strongroom directly or use your account with them to edit this preference. We do not recommend signing up for this service unless the person signing up is an owner of the business or a very permanent employee. We’ve found this often happens because an accounts receivable employee signs up for it, that person leaves their employment, and then no one else knows how to access it.
How do I update my mailing address in the Resident Center?
While you can update your email address, password and phone number from the Resident Center, the software provider doesn’t allow homeowners to directly update their own mailing addresses. We would prefer they did, but this isn’t within our control. Hopefully they will change this at some point in the future. For now, please email us at service[AT]ajenning.com with your correct mailing address and we will update it for you. Please replace [AT] with the @ symbol when emailing. We don’t publish email addresses to the web verbatim to prevent spam bots from picking them up.
Can I make a payment over the phone?
We are unable to accept payments over the phone. If you wish to make an instant electronic payment, we recommend using the online Resident Center to do so. Payments can be made using a bank account’s routing and account number for free or with a credit or debit card for a fee equal to 2.99% of the transaction, plus $1.
What is done about people who don’t pay their assessments?
If someone doesn’t pay their assessments, they will typically receive a few late notices from our office, including the imposition of late fees in accordance with your association’s governing documents. If they fall two or three full months behind and our late notices have not led to any communication or payment arrangements, the Board of Directors will likely vote to send their account to the association’s attorney for further collections efforts.
The attorney’s office will send what’s called a demand letter informing the homeowner the account has been turned over to their office, and it will add any attorney fees incurred to the balance. Either at that time or up to 30 to 45 days later, the attorney will record a lien against the property. If after another 30 to 45 days the balance still hasn’t been paid, the attorney will file a civil suit against the homeowner. Once a judgment is obtained, if the homeowner still doesn’t pay within 30 to 45 days from that point, the attorney will take actions to enforce the judgment.
The actions which the attorney will take to enforce the judgment vary depending on the unique circumstances of that homeowner and their property. Actions can include wage garnishments, bank levies, seizure of personal property such as vehicles, sheriff’s sale of the property or judicial or nonjudicial foreclosure.
In the end, all assessments and legal costs, usually including all late fees in accordance with the association’s governing documents, are able to be collected. If the homeowner files bankruptcy they may be personally relieved from obligation to pay pre-filing amounts owed, but those amounts remain owed by the property and can usually be collected in the future when the property sells. If a homeowner is foreclosed upon by their mortgage lender during this process, as often those not paying their assessments are also not paying their mortgage, the lender may not be required to pay the association in full, but the homeowner remains personally liable for the debt.
While not as secure as other types of debts like taxes, student loans or child support, it is very rare homeowners can permanently avoid paying the assessments they owe, even if they declare bankruptcy or at some point in the process no longer own the property.
There is a common belief that a lien can be filed against the property but then the association must wait for the homeowner to sell in order to collect what is owed, and there isn’t much else that can be done in the meantime. This is simply false.
How much of the assessments we pay goes to cover the people who don’t pay their assessments?
Budgets are not written to factor delinquency, and thus no amount of the assessments are based on the expectation that some homeowners will not pay what they owe. Budgets are written under the assumption that every homeowner will pay their assessments in full and on time. While that, of course, isn’t always the case, typically income from other sources which is not budgeted will make up the difference. This can include late fees, fines, certain amounts of bank account interest earned, and often includes the collection of delinquent amounts from previous years. In other words, someone who isn’t paying timely today may be offset in the big picture by someone paying who incurred their debts in a previous year. In the end, the income the association collects in reality versus the budget is almost always near 100% of expectations, give or take a little.
I’m the new buyer of a property. How do I get set up with your company to make payments?
First, congratulations on the purchase of your new home, and welcome to the community!
At closing, the title company should have collected the first full month’s assessment from you, so you shouldn’t owe any assessments out-of-pocket until your second full month. Sometimes the title companies don’t follow our instructions on this, but most often they do.
Once we receive that first full month the title company collected from you at closing, we will set up an account for you and mail out a welcome letter. That letter will include your account number and how to get set up with the Resident Center, if you choose to. There is nothing you need to do until you receive that letter, and since your first full month has already been paid, there should be sufficient time for the title company to send your closing proceeds to us and for us to send our welcome letter to you.
When setting up autopay, what is the difference between choosing a fixed amount and “Entire balance”, and which do you recommend?
If you choose a fixed amount, the software will always withdraw that amount and that amount only on the day of your choosing. If that amount is too little, too much, no longer matches the assessments as the years go by and the amounts change, it will still just pull the same amount on the same day each month.
We recommend using the “Entire balance” setting with no maximum. This will give you the ability to set it and forget it. If you are ever underpaid for any reason, it will pull the extra amount outstanding. If you’re ever overpaid, it will reduce your payment by the amount of the overpayment. As assessments change over the years, you will not need to readjust it.
The one warning we offer is for early payers: When you use the “Entire balance” setting, the software can only see 5 days into the future. If you set your payment date too early, especially on 31-day months, it may not be able to see the future charges on the date you chose and thus won’t pull any amount out. We recommend choosing the 27th as your withdrawal date to prevent this from happening.