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COMMUNITY
ASSOCIATION MANAGER – A LICENSED PROFESSION?
By
Jan Bergemann
Published
September 26, 2014
Florida's community association managers are supposed to be
licensed – and so are the management firms they are working
for.
But:
Are they really all licensed?
Definitely
not! We hear all the time stories of folks who worked – and
got paid – as community association managers without ever
having a license. One of the problems we see all the time: The
DBPR – supposedly in charge of licensing professionals in
Florida
– is very lax in enforcing license requirements.
Owners
discover more and more often that the person they are paying as
community association manager isn’t licensed. But complaints
to the DBPR are often answered by offering the person, who
worked and got paid as community association manager, to get a
license – and all is forgiven and forgotten.
That
surely doesn’t encourage folks to make the required license BEFORE
starting to work in that profession.
It’s
tempting to work without a license and avoid paying annual
licensing fees if the only penalty you have to be afraid of is a
letter asking you to get a license.
And
– with the help of former State Representative
Julio Robaina
– CCFJ added a provision into FS
468.431 - 438 -- Part VIII (FS
468.432) that requires Community
Association Management firms to be licensed as well.
But
how can you be sure that the person – and the firm – getting
paid as community association managers are actually licensed?
Easy going: Go to the Website of the DBPR and click on the tab: Verify
A License! (https://www.myfloridalicense.com/wl11.asp?mode=0&SID=)
Type
in the name of the person who claims to be a licensed manager
and/or the name of the firm he/she is working for. In all cases
you should find a more detailed license description with aa
license number and expiration date.
If
you can’t find this info confirming that the person/firm has a
license you better start researching more thoroughly. You might
be on the right track of discovering that the person/firm
working as your community manager/firm doesn’t have the
required license!
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Jan Bergemann is president of Cyber Citizens For Justice,
Florida
's largest state-wide property owners' advocacy group.
CCFJ works on legislation to help owners living in
community
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associations. He moved to
Florida
in 1995 - hoping to retire. He moved into a HOA, where the
developer cheated the homeowners and used the association dues
for his own purposes. End of retirement!
CCFJ was born in the year 2000, when some owners met in
Tallahassee
- finding out that power is only in numbers. Bergemann was a
member of Governor Jeb Bush's HOA Task force in 2003/2004.
The organization has two websites to inform interested
Florida
homeowners and condo owners:
News Website: http://www.ccfj.net/.
Educational Website: http://www.ccfjfoundation.net/.
We think that only owners can really represent owners, since all
service providers surely have a different interest! We are
trying to create owner-friendly laws, but the best laws are
useless without enforcement. And enforcement is totally lacking
in
Florida
!
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