In July of 2015 I took over as the President of ou...

In July of 2015 I took over as the President of out HOA. We met with C.O.O Craig Tice of LBPM and were initially impressed with the pricing, contract we developed and his personal assurances of aiding us through the transition. We had some doubts about LBPM based on the reviews, but made the age old mistake of thinking LBPM had to be better than our old management company. We were wrong. In hiring LBPM we also based our decision on the veteran and competent manager Craig wanted to assign, David. We liked David and were assured by him that our account would be handled well. Alas, David suddenly quit LBPM due to compensation issues even before LBPM could schedule our first board meeting. Craig hid this from the board for weeks, and soon assigned the pleasant yet inept Marinel as our manager. Things only got worse from there.....

I don't have the space, nor most readers the time, to go over every single mistake LBPM made over the last six months. Marinel was in over her head, and had personal issues that require her to take inordinate vacation and sick days. I felt like we were playing the proverbial telephone game with LBPM, except I made a point of communicating via e-mail so how they could get things wrong is still is beyond me. Furthermore, to add to the irony they rarely if ever answered the phone or returned member calls. LBPM managed to even send out mailers and information to the wrong addresses and incorrect names in spite of being given an accurate excel spreadsheet. When lights would go out, LBPM seemed incapable of sending out my e-mail list to our light vendor. Whenever I personally intervened and spoke directly with the vendor the problems vanished. Their vaunted Emergency system is a joke. When a light pole was knocked down the vendor they sent out had me cover it with a plastic planter cover and tried to bilk us for $4,000 to fix the light. I contacted another vendor and had it done for $1200. If you can't trust the vendors the management team sends out, that alone is grounds for termination. In January our accountant sent an e-mail requesting ten key documents for tax preperation. Our previous manager always dispatched the required documents within 30 days. When I requested a deadline or a time frame to get our accountant the tax documents Craig personally told me we don't pay his company enough for that level of service, nor does he do deadlines. Really? Our accountant was so disgusted by the process that he no longer will work with us and the taxes were literally sent out on the final day, April 17th.

The specific criteria we put into our contract regarding maintanence and projects were never followed. We would request bids for four projects and months later only one project would have a bid for us to vote on. I don't tolerate fools or incompetents. Property management is not complicated albeit it requires attention to detail and time. Board politics even with an ideal board often delay terminations and swift resolutions. The rest of the board soon came to dislike LB and found them inept, however as President I bore the burden of dealing with them and thus they were shielded from most of the incompetence. Eventually we fired LBPM and the transition is now as complicated in dealing with them when they managed us. In closing avoid LBPM like the plague. Beware them.