The first board elected by owners takes office holding a set of decisions it didn't make. The budget was written by somebody else. The insurance was bought by somebody else, for a community that was half the size it is now.
Ninety days is enough time to read all of it and fix the parts that need fixing. Here's an order of work, in five blocks that deliberately overlap, since a board waiting for one to finish before starting the next will run out of days. If the handover itself is still ahead of you, the developer turnover arc covers what has to change hands before any of this starts.
Days 1 to 15: seat the board properly
An election that won't survive a challenge undermines everything the board does afterward, so start by confirming the one you just held was run to the documents: notice period, quorum, ballot form, who counted and where the ballots are now. How HOA board elections are supposed to work is the reference if your community has never run one without the developer.
Then do the corporate housekeeping. Confirm the association's registration with the state is current and the registered agent address is one somebody reads. File the change of officers if your state requires it. Order new bank signature cards, because the outgoing signers are the developer's people.
Adopt a records rule at the first meeting: everything the board receives goes into one shared place.
Days 15 to 45: open the books
Ask for the opening numbers in writing and put a date on the answer: operating balance, reserve balance, receivables, and the assessments the developer has paid on the lots it still holds.
Read the current budget line by line against what the community spends now. Developer-era budgets are built for a partly finished neighborhood with fewer homes, less landscaping to mow and lower insurance limits, and they often assume a subsidy that ends the day control does. A budget that balanced last year can be short this year without anybody doing anything wrong.
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Commission a transition audit early, while memories and files are still fresh.
Days 30 to 60: read every contract you inherited
Pull every agreement the developer-appointed board signed and build a single sheet: vendor, service, annual cost, term, renewal date, cancellation terms, and who the contract names as the client.
CAI's HOAresources guide to hiring HOA contractors is written for a board about to sign, and it doubles as a review checklist for contracts you already have. Its practical points: the contract should clearly identify the association as the client, with the management company named only as care-of rather than as the responsible party; the full scope of work should be detailed; and the terms should cover payment, the association's rights when work is unsatisfactory, how the vendor handles corrections, and the conditions for cancellation. The article also notes that many terms are written to benefit the vendor, and that asking for changes is normal.
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The same guide covers credentials, and it applies to inherited vendors as much as new ones: get a W-9, proof of insurance, and verification of any required licenses. As the article puts it, an unlicensed contractor is also an uninsured contractor, and if that contractor is injured on the property the association is liable.
Don't cancel everything in week one. Find the renewal dates first. A contract with sixty days to run and a thirty-day notice window is a decision with a deadline attached, and the rest can wait for a proper bid.
Days 45 to 75: re-check the insurance
Insurance bought for a community of 40 homes doesn't fit a community of 200. Get the current declarations pages, confirm the named insured is the association as it exists now, and have an agent walk the board through what the association's policy covers and what it leaves to owners.
Directors and officers coverage deserves its own conversation, because it protects the volunteers personally. The Insurance Information Institute describes D&O liability insurance as covering individuals for claims made against them while serving on a board of directors or as an officer, written for not-for-profit organizations as well as businesses. Its structure runs in parts the industry calls Sides: Side A protects directors and officers when the organization can't indemnify them, Side B reimburses the organization when it does, and Side C covers the entity itself.
Standard exclusions on the same page include fraud, personal profiting, bodily injury and property damage, and insured-versus-insured claims. Even where directors are cleared of wrongdoing, the legal fees of responding are real. Our own guide to D&O insurance for HOA boards covers what a community-association policy looks like in practice.
Days 75 to 90: set the operating rhythm
Publish a meeting calendar for the year. Decide what goes in the board packet and circulate it before meetings. Write down who is responsible for assessments, for vendor calls and for the document file, and put those names in the minutes.
Then stop.
Related Reading
- HOA Developer Turnover: How Your Community Changes Hands
- What Is a Declarant in an HOA? Meaning, Rights, and Control
- What Every New HOA Board Member Needs to Know Fast
- HOA Board Meeting Packets: What Goes In and Why
For these ninety days, finished means something narrow: a valid election, current corporate filings, a budget that matches the community as it stands, contracts with known renewal dates, and insurance written for the association's real size.
New boards that want the owner roster and the document file loaded before the first meeting can do that on HOA-OS during the 30-day trial, which needs no credit card.