Community Management Services

I had a very unfortunate experience with them. I own a rental property in Indy that is in an HOA. This HOA is managed by CMS. I bought the house about 18 months ago. On the HUD closing statement there was a line item where the HOA gets a year of dues (no biggie). There was also a CMS «account set-​up fee» to CMS directly (ok, I should’ve seen this nonsense). There was also a «transfer fee» to CMS directly (I also should have seen this).
Basically at purchase of rental, I prepaid a year of HOA and promptly forgot about the HOA. Post close, I didn’t receive any welcome letter or invitation to setup auto pay. Then about 4 weeks ago I received a letter saying we were 5 months behind on HOA fees and that we’re being charged penalties monthly (annoying but ok). I go on vacation for 3 weeks and get back to find a «we’re going to file a lien on your property if you don’t get current» letter from CMS.
Of course, I write to them and instruct my property manager to cut them a check for the HOA fees (not penalties).
I ask politely if they could waive the fees because I had forgotten about the HOA but also I hadn’t receive any welcome notice or any letters up until 4 weeks ago. My expectations were that they would respond like any normal company (Amazon, Nordstroms, Safeway etc). I figured we’d part as friends (I was wrong).
However their stance was «you’re wrong, we’re right — you need to pay the penalties in full» — Now we’re not talking about alot of money here but it’s just an upside down customer service model. In fact its completely backwards.
So if you want to deal with a company that will always put themselves before the customer, then I’d recommend Community Management Services.
If you like to deal with companies that put the customer first — I wouldn’t touch this company with a 10 foot pole. If you’re an HOA looking for a manager who provides exceptional service, this isn’t the one.

If I could, this company would get 0 stars. It’d be wonderful if the staff could work with the board members to resolve issues on budget, but these people seem to dictate what our condo complex should be. In addition, they only seem to resolve a percentage of work order requests such as fixing a gate lock. In the bigger scheme of things, this would all be forgiving if we got an apology from time to time, but when the staff themselves get combative, argumentative, and dismissive, it makes me want to write a Unilocal review.