The HOA Case Files Podast
HOA Case Files is the weekly podcast for people who said yes to a volunteer board and then inherited the building, the bank account, and the neighbor who replies-all.
We cover condos, homeowners associations, co-ops, mobile home parks and resident-owned communities, marinas, camp parks, and deed-restricted neighborhoods. Same job, different roof: collect the money, keep the place standing, tell owners the truth, and do it without turning every Tuesday into a deposition.
Each episode starts with a real case. A news story, a court filing, a reserve surprise, a vendor invoice that should never have cleared, a meeting that went sideways, an owner fight that ate six months. We walk through what happened in plain English. Then we argue the only three questions that matter to a volunteer director:
- What did it actually cost — money, time, and goodwill?
- What was the risk if the board did nothing?
- Was the fight worth it?
We do not do legal fog. We are not your attorney, and we will not pretend a statute citation is the same thing as a plan. We talk like treasurers and presidents who still have a day job: assessments, roofs, docks, reserves, work orders, minutes, elections, and the vendor who always has one more change order.
When a story turns on process — invoices nobody matched, minutes nobody can find, a vendor with no certificate of insurance, a vote that lived in someone’s inbox — we say so. That is also where SoShiny lives in the show: not as a commercial, as the counterfactual. What would a real ledger, a payable that needs two eyes, a work order with photos, or a searchable set of CC&Rs have changed? Sometimes the answer is “not much.” We say that too.
If you sit on a self-managed board and you want interesting plus useful — a story you can tell at the next meeting and a checklist you can run on Monday — this is the show.
From the team at SoShiny.com. Association software for boards that want less paperwork and fewer surprises.
The HOA Case Files Podast
Latest Episodes
The Crew Showed Up, The Paper Didn't: Condo Board Got Sued.
A roofing crew is already on the building. The COI isn’t. License, current insurance, and additional insured — before the first nail.The truck is in the lot. The ladder’s on the stucco. Work has started and nobody pulled this week’s cer...
The Rule Existed. The Building Burned Anyway.
A propane barbecue on a first-floor balcony. A written rule about grills. A six-alarm fire that gutted Spinnaker Cove in Foster City — about 51 units, more than 150 residents displaced, building red-tagged and a total loss. Four firefighters in...
Your Minutes are a Lie Because a Robot Wrote Them
The AI wrote our draft minutes in nine seconds. Case file #4 follows three volunteer secretaries in three states running three different transcription tools. Dana in Daytona Beach uses Notion, w...
FRAUD: The $5.8 Million Theft, COA Lockdown and Board Jail-Time
Miami-Dade deputies say fake invoices and captured volunteer boards drained at least $5.8 million from five associations. The directors, the sheriff said, had no idea. Cost, risk, and whether your payables would have caught it.On ...
OMG: Our Main Electrical Line is a 1980's Fuse Panel
A California condo board switched insurers after ten years, relaxed, then opened a letter: replace the 1980s fuse boxes hiding next to the elevators. Two weeks. Two electricians. One bid that would have eaten the savings — and garage doors that...
