There is probably already a Facebook group for your neighborhood. The real question is not whether one should exist. It is whether your board should run it.
Those are different decisions with different consequences, and boards tend to collapse them into one. A resident-run group is a place your community talks about you. A board-run group is a place your community talks to you, which means the board owns what happens there.
What it does well
Reach, speed, and the fact that people are already there. A neighborhood group reaches households that never gave the board an email address, and it reaches them on a device they check anyway. For a water main break at 6am, that is worth a great deal.
It is also the only channel most boards have where residents talk to each other rather than to the board. Lost dogs, contractor recommendations, a heads-up that somebody's gate is open. None of that is association business, and all of it is the thing that makes people feel like they live somewhere rather than next to strangers.
Boards that run a group well tend to describe the same benefit: fewer formal complaints, because a question gets a neighbor's answer before it becomes a letter.
The moderation load nobody budgets for
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Here is the part that gets underestimated. If the board runs the group, a volunteer is on the hook for it. Not for posting, which is easy. For deciding what stays up.
The decisions arrive quickly and they are unpleasant. A resident names a neighbor and their address in a complaint about a dog. Somebody posts a screenshot of another owner's delinquency. A thread about short-term rentals turns into an argument about who is renting to whom. Every one of those is a judgment call made in public by an unpaid director at 10pm.
Two of them carry real exposure and are worth naming plainly.
Selective moderation looks like selective enforcement. If you delete criticism of the board and leave criticism of a resident, you have handed somebody a pattern to point at. Our post on fair rule enforcement covers why inconsistency is the thing that actually loses disputes, and the logic carries over to a channel the board controls.
Housing-related statements are regulated. The Fair Housing Act reaches statements about housing, not only formal decisions. Section 3604 of the federal statute makes it unlawful to make, print or publish a notice, statement or advertisement about the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates a preference or limitation based on a protected characteristic; the statutory text is on Cornell's Legal Information Institute, and the Department of Justice publishes a plain overview of the Act and its protected classes. A board-run page where "we prefer families" or a comment about a group of residents sits unmoderated is a place a board can create a problem it did not intend. If a thread on your group is heading that direction, that is a moment to talk to your association's attorney rather than to a search engine.
None of that is an argument against running a group. It is an argument for deciding in advance who moderates, against what written standard, and with what backup when that person is on vacation.
Keep the official channel official
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The rule that keeps this workable: nothing is official because it was posted in the group.
Notices are not served there. Votes are not taken there. Complaints logged there are not logged. Board discussion does not happen there, because a comment thread among a quorum of directors is a conversation your open-meeting requirements probably have an opinion about, and your documents and state statute are where that answer lives.
What the group is allowed to do is point. A post that says "the September assessment notice went out by mail today, and here is the deadline" is fine. A post that says "we've decided to raise dues, thoughts?" has moved a board decision into a comment section.
Give residents one sentence in the group description that says where the real channels are: the inbound address for requests, the mailed or portal-delivered notices, the meeting where decisions get made. Then be strict about it, including when a resident raises a genuine issue in a comment. The answer is "send that to the association address so it gets tracked," followed by actually tracking it. Our post on handling homeowner complaints covers what tracking looks like.
So, should you?
Run one if you have a named moderator, a written standard for what comes down, and a board that will hold the line on official business going elsewhere. Let the residents run theirs if you do not, and participate in it as a neighbor rather than as the association.
Either way, the group is the informal layer. The announcements, notices, requests and records still need somewhere to live, which is the argument in our cornerstone on the communication tools your board actually needs. HOA-OS covers that side: board announcements and AI-assisted newsletters on every plan, document management, a member directory with electronic-contact preferences, plus a form builder and community voting on Community plans. Every plan opens with a 30-day free trial and no credit card. See the plans.
Residents will talk online either way. What your board decides is whether the association is the host, and hosting is a job with hours attached.