Clarifying Homeowners Associations with Lodestar

Our co-founder, Anton Tonev, had the pleasure to chat with Jim Paolino, CEO at LodeStar about homeowner associations, homebuying experience, and the changing landscape of the real estate industry. Anton also shared his experience of running a company and the importance of choosing the right team. Check out the episode below or listen on Spotify – we loved it (not biased at all)!

In the U.S. there are around 400 000 HOAs. If you look at the different estimates of the market size, there are around 100-120 million people living within an HOA. One simple way to look at is if you have 320-330 million people in the U.S., around 100 million are living in rental properties and rental apartments. They usually don’t deal with HOAs.

From the other 200-ish million, around half of them are living within an HOA. Another interesting fact is that 75% of the new construction for sale is within an HOA. So besides being a big market, it is also growing significantly because HOAs are becoming a bigger part of the construction buildings.

HOAs are actually great organizations that keep the value of the building through time and maintain it. The problem is that there are 400 000 of them. And most of them are not digitized, which creates a lot of extra work for escrow officers and loan officers.

Getting documents from an HOA means you get around 300 pages of legal files that you have to go through to extract the specific bits of information that you need. If you are a loan officer, that’s about 10 data points that you will use from the whole 300 pages. But you still have to go through them.

Or you can leverage technology to do it quickly. That’s what InspectHOA does. We break down the whole task of acquiring and making sense of data into small pieces. Imagine a conveyor line where things are moving along very fast because it’s not one person responsible for all the 12 steps of getting the documents. You can think about it as Jira or Asana for HOAs.

But most importantly, it is not about moving PDFs from HOAs to title companies and lenders. Once we get the documents, we extract useful information from them. The documents usually come as scanned PDFs which we run through our NLP algorithms to automatically filter the information.

The reports that we deliver to clients always have the same format, no matter if the HOA is in California, Florida, or Texas. Our clients always have all the information available at their fingertips and they know what to expect. This is our biggest value proposition.

A big part of what we do and how we manage to do it is the team. Building a high-performing company is not easy, and at the same time, it’s incredibly rewarding. And it is all about the team. We spend a lot of resources on hiring the right people who we trust to build their teams. And the trust that we have in each other translates into the trust that our clients have in us.