Our roots go back long before 2021.
Ceanne and her husband Steve built small townhouse-style communities in Oregon — five units, twelve, fifteen, eighteen. At the time they didn’t think of them as “small HOAs.” They were just their developments. But every project ended the same way: build a great community, sell it, and transition it well to the owners.
Ceanne ran the HOA side — the budgets, the assessments, the compliance, the turnover to the board. And every single time, she hit the same wall trying to find professional management for communities this size. She tried three paths.
The big firms wouldn’t pick up.
Ceanne called three or four of the largest management companies in Oregon to manage a 15-unit community. Every one said the same thing: “You’re too small for us to even consider.” One was candid — they couldn’t take a community netting them less than $1,000 a month. For a 12-unit community, that math meant about $85 per owner, every month. It would have doubled the assessment.
The one that took the call went silent.
She handed a company three communities at once — drove down in person with everything organized: checks, transfers, files. Four months later an owner called: they’d never heard from the company. Ceanne went back to the office. The files she’d handed over were sitting in the exact same place, untouched. Nobody had done anything.
Bookkeeping-only left the rest broken.
A great bookkeeper agreed to handle four or five communities. The books got done — but boards needed someone who knew about state business registrations, covenants, and compliance. The bookkeeper didn’t. So the financials were fine, and everything else was still a mess.
That was the moment Ceanne decided: fine, I’ll do it myself.
So she and Steve started managing their own communities. Word spread to other builder colleagues. People started asking for help. The model evolved out of necessity — find the services small HOAs actually need, deliver them at a price these communities can actually afford, hire experienced people who know the real answers, and run it as a real business, not a side gig. That’s where the hybrid model came from.
When Ceanne first introduced the idea at a national industry conference, the reaction from traditional firms was bewilderment. The assumption was you couldn’t serve small associations profitably. She knew you could — with the right boundaries and a team willing to work hard. That gap was real, and nobody else was filling it.
