Homeowners Associations Editing and Proofreading Services

Somebody has painted their front door the wrong colour, or parked a van where vans are not allowed, or built a shed six inches over a line. A letter has to be written by a volunteer to a neighbour they will see at the shop tomorrow. It is the hardest correspondence in community governance, and the two usual versions — the legalistic one and the passive-aggressive one — both end in a grievance that outlasts the shed.

We edit what homeowners and residents associations produce — enforcement and breach correspondence, covenant and rule documentation, architectural and alteration approval processes and decisions, meeting notices, agendas and minutes, budget and assessment communications, welcome and information packs for new owners, dispute and appeal procedures, common area and amenity rules, community newsletters and notices, and correspondence with owners in arrears. Our editors work on the letter one neighbour sends another.

The enforcement letter is where an association either resolves a breach or creates a feud, and its failure is register. Written as a legal notice it invites a legal response; written apologetically it achieves nothing and has to be sent again. We work through these so the letter opens by naming the specific thing and where the rule comes from, with the article and the date it was adopted, since an owner needs to know this is a rule the community agreed and not a preference of the current board; so the action requested is specific with a date that is realistic for the work involved, because a fourteen-day deadline for something needing a contractor produces a fight rather than compliance; so the letter states what happens next at each stage, given that an owner who can see the whole path is far more likely to stop at the first step; so the route to disagree is offered explicitly — the appeal, the variance application, the chance to be heard — as most enforcement disputes are really about not having been asked; so the tone is neutral about the person and specific about the thing, since any sentence implying character is the sentence that gets read aloud at a meeting; so anything the association got wrong is acknowledged, whether a rule that was never circulated or an approval given verbally by a previous board; and so the letter is signed by a role with a contact rather than by the board collectively. Letters written this way close the matter without a lawyer.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including correspondence, governing documents and owner information. We are editors rather than legal advisers or community managers, and we offer no view on covenants, enforcement or disputes. What we can do is make the letter specific about the thing and neutral about the person.