Condo Association Management Blog

As a former board president I fought against the move in/out fees. In my opinion they are highly unethical, and I have lobbied my representatives to pass a law banning them. 
 
1) They are commonly used to discriminate against renters. There are plenty of tools that most boards are too lazy to use to deal with specific problem renters. Plus I ran statistics on our perceived "renter problem" in our association, and found all but one of our major problems were caused from homeowners. In fact, normalizing for the population, a homeowner was 4.5 times more likely to be involved with illegal activity or cause damage to the common property than a renter was. By discriminating against renters, you are punishing a large percentage of people for things they haven't done. Last time I checked, that violates Ethics 101, and some could call it a form of bigotry especially if when faced with the cold hard facts, as so many of our "anti-renter crusaders" were and continue to deny the real problems. 
 
2) People move in and move out all the time. It's as natural part of the business as mowing the grass and fixing the concrete - everyone has to do it eventually. If you feel you need to charge people extra money for moving in and out, you are failing to create a proper budget and are trying to do an end around your assessment fees. Regarding keys, you could look into electronic solutions that would be far cheaper than changing the locks all the time. Again, you're just being lazy by charging people more instead of looking for better long term solutions. 
 
3) Charging people a fee for damage they MIGHT do is extremely unethical. Plus scuffing of walls is a cheap and easy repair and probably far less expensive than the damage probably done to the mover's property. But there is a solution to this - it's called a security deposit. Why are you trying to re-invent the wheel? 
 
Bottom line, It's been my experience that if you are running your association correctly there is no need to charge extra fees. And a move out fee that is significantly higher than a move in fee, has no other explanation other than the association trying to milk people on their way out.

As the President of my HOA I'm going to recommend a modest move-in fee to the Board. Security deposits involve a lot of administrative overhead. Furthermore, how do you collect a move-out security deposit?  
 
Adjusting our budget and assessing fees on owners who are not renting their units to cover additional maintenance overhead from moving activities amounts to subsidizing other owners who are leasing their units.  
 
The only way to ensure the Association has funds to cover routine maintenance overhead due to moving activity is to charge an up-front fee.