Trustee Guide

MA Condo Association Management: The Complete Trustee's Guide

If you were just elected to your condo board, here is the short version of the job: you protect the building, the owners' money, and the association's compliance with the law and your own documents. That is the whole role in one sentence. Everything below is the detail.

I am Jarrett Lau. I run Green Ocean Property Management, where my team manages 60+ Massachusetts condo associations. I built this site because most trustees are volunteers who never asked to learn this and got handed it anyway. This guide walks the entire job at a high level, then points you to deeper guides on the parts that trip people up most.

What does a condo trustee actually do?

A condo trustee is a volunteer, usually a unit owner, elected to the board to run the association on behalf of all owners. You have a fiduciary duty, which means you are legally expected to act in the association's best interest, not your own, and to be reasonably careful with its money and decisions.

In Massachusetts, condominiums are governed by M.G.L. c. 183A (the Massachusetts Condominium Act) plus your association's own recorded documents (the master deed, declaration of trust or bylaws, and rules). When those two disagree, you follow the law first, then your documents. The job breaks into five areas:

Reserves and capital planning — making sure money is set aside for big future repairs.
Financial management — budgets, dues collection, clean books, owner transparency.
Compliance — statutory inspections, insurance, and following your own documents.
Running the board — meetings, votes, records, and communicating with owners.
Vendors and the building — maintenance, contractors, and who you hire to help.

You do not have to be an expert in all five. You have to be careful in all five, and know when to get help.

How do reserves and capital planning work?

Reserves are the single thing that separates a calmly run association from one in crisis. Your building has expensive parts that wear out on a schedule you can predict: the roof, the boiler, the elevator, the paving, the siding. A reserve fund is the savings account that pays for those replacements when they come due, so owners are not hit with a surprise bill.

Two questions decide everything here:

How much should we have? This is measured as "percent funded" — how much you have versus how much you ideally should have for where your building is in its lifecycle.
How do we know? A reserve study is the engineering and financial report that tells you. Reading one is a learnable skill, and it is the most valuable hour a trustee can spend.

When reserves are too low, the bill does not disappear. It arrives as a special assessment: a one-time charge split among owners, often with little notice. Avoiding that is mostly arithmetic done early.

Go deeper:

How should a trustee handle the association's money?

Beyond reserves, you are responsible for the association's operating money. The core duties:

Budget annually. Project the year's expenses, set dues to cover them plus a reserve contribution, and document how you got there.
Collect dues and handle delinquencies consistently and in line with your documents and the law. Selective enforcement is where boards get into trouble.
Keep clean, transparent books. Owners are entitled to see the association's finances. A board that hides or fumbles the numbers loses trust fast and exposes itself.
Separate operating and reserve funds. Reserve money is for capital replacement, not for plugging an operating shortfall.

A simple test: if an owner asked you today, "where did our money go this year and how much do we have set aside," could you answer with a document, not a guess? If not, that is the first thing to fix.

What compliance does a MA condo association have to keep up with?

Compliance is the quiet risk. Nothing looks wrong until an inspection lapses or a claim gets denied. The main buckets:

Statutory inspections. Buildings have required inspection cycles for systems like fire alarm, sprinkler, elevator, backflow, and boiler, depending on what your building has. Specific cadences and deadlines vary by system and current state regulation, so confirm yours against current law rather than relying on memory.
Insurance. The association carries master coverage; you also want to confirm every vendor on site carries their own insurance (a certificate of insurance) before they work.
Following your own documents. Many disputes come not from breaking the law but from a board not following its own recorded bylaws and rules.
Records. Meeting minutes, votes, financials, and notices kept properly. They protect the board if a decision is ever challenged.

You do not have to memorize the inspection calendar. You have to make sure something, or someone, tracks it so nothing lapses on your watch.

How does a trustee run the board well?

The board runs the association, and most board pain is process pain. The basics that prevent most problems:

Hold real meetings and keep minutes. Decisions made in a hallway are hard to defend later.
Vote properly. Know what your documents require a vote for, and who is allowed to vote.
Communicate with owners before decisions land on them, especially anything that costs money. Surprises breed conflict.
Document. When a decision is written down with the reasoning, the board is protected and the next board is not starting from zero.

You are a committee, not a solo operator. The goal is not to do everything yourself. It is to make sure the right things happen and are recorded.

When should a condo association hire a property manager?

You should consider hiring a professional manager when any of these is true: the volunteer running things is burning out, the books are not clean, compliance is slipping, a reserve or special-assessment problem is looming, or your building has simply outgrown being run in someone's spare time.

A good manager does the five jobs above with you: capital planning and reserves, financials and transparency, compliance tracking, meeting and records support, and vendor and maintenance management. The point is not to remove the board's authority. It is to give the board a competent operator so trustees can govern instead of doing data entry at 11pm.

This is the part of the job my firm does for associations every day. If you want to see how a professional team handles the full list, that is a conversation worth having. But you do not need us to be a good trustee. You need to understand the job, which is what this site is for.

The fastest way to find your association's gaps

Reading a guide is one thing. Knowing where your specific association stands is another. The quickest way to find your gaps is to walk a checklist built for MA trustees, covering reserves, financials, compliance, and governance, in plain language.

I put together The MA Condo Board's Reserve & Compliance Checklist so any trustee can run their own association through it in an afternoon. It is free.

Download the MA Condo Board's Reserve & Compliance Checklist

It pairs with every deeper guide on this site. Start with reserves, since that is where the biggest, most preventable problems hide.