You know the moment. The treasurer gets to the delinquency line, says a few owners are behind, and somebody at the table says what everybody is thinking: let’s give them another month. Nobody wants to be the board that goes after a neighbor. So the item gets tabled, and it gets tabled again in November, and by spring that balance has grown teeth.
We see this every year, and the pattern almost never changes. Delinquency problems don’t get solved by waiting. They get bigger and more awkward to fix.
What the national numbers are actually saying
HousingWire reported that property tax delinquency has reached its highest level since 2017, citing data from Cotality. Worth reading the rest of that sentence, though: the rate is still below the long-term average of 5.4%, and part of the increase reflects normal seasonal patterns.
So this isn’t a crisis headline. It’s a signal. When owners start slipping on property taxes, assessments tend to be in the same stack of bills. Your association is one line item in a household budget that is getting tighter, and you’re competing with the mortgage, the tax bill, and the insurance premium.
Which makes October the right month to look at your aging report with clear eyes, because you’re building next year’s budget on the assumption that people pay.
The part boards underestimate: it’s a cash flow problem first
An unpaid assessment doesn’t reduce your expenses. The landscaper still shows up. The water bill still comes. Insurance renews whether or not unit 14 paid in August.
So the shortfall gets covered from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually operating cash, and when operating cash runs thin the board borrows from reserves and calls it temporary. Then the roof needs attention three years earlier than the reserve study assumed, the money isn’t there, and owners who paid on time every single month get a special assessment.
That’s the thing worth saying out loud at your next meeting.
Delay doesn’t protect the delinquent owner. It transfers the cost to the owners who paid.
Who touches a balance, and who can change one
Here’s the piece most boards never ask about, and it’s the one we’d ask first.
Collections is a money-handling function. Payments come in, balances go out, and somewhere in the middle a person has the ability to adjust a ledger. That’s where things go sideways.
Separation of duties. The person who receives and posts payments is not the person who can waive a late fee, reverse a charge, or write off a balance. If one person can do both, a payment can be taken and the account marked current with nothing to show it ever happened. Not a sophisticated scheme. One person, no second set of eyes.
So two controls we’d want in place before anything else:
1
Every waiver, write-off, or payment plan gets board approval and shows up in the minutes with the owner’s unit and the amount. No verbal deals. No exceptions for anyone’s cousin.
2
The board reviews a full aging report every month, by unit, broken into 30, 60, 90, and 120-plus day buckets, not a single summary number on the treasurer’s report. A summary number hides which accounts are aging and whether the same three units have been sitting at 120 days all year.
If the aging total hasn’t moved in four months but the write-off line keeps growing, that’s a question worth asking before you move to new business.
Act on a calendar, not on a feeling
The reason collections go sideways is almost never bad intent. It’s inconsistency. One owner gets a call in week three, another gets nothing for eight months, and the board can’t explain why.
Write down your escalation steps and follow them the same way for every account. First reminder. Second notice. When the matter leaves the board’s hands. What a payment plan looks like and what happens if someone misses a payment on it. Then run it the same way every month, so no individual owner is making a judgment call about a neighbor in the moment.
What escalation legally looks like, including liens and anything beyond a notice, depends heavily on your state and your governing documents. The rules on notice, timing, fees, and interest vary a lot state to state and they change. Have your association attorney review your collection policy before you adopt it, and have them look at it again if it has been sitting untouched for a few years.
What it looks like when the process holds
We track these numbers for the associations we serve, and Vantaca, the accounting platform we work in, benchmarks the same measures across the management companies that use its software. Here is how our clients compared over the four quarters ending July 2025.
Trailing four-quarter average
HOAAS clients
All MCs
Enterprise MCs
Professional MCs
Doors with an open collection
2.30%
7.35%
6.55%
7.60%
Collections closed without an attorney
99.33%
83.46%
91.50%
80.05%
Source: Vantaca business review, August 2025. MCs = management companies in Vantaca’s benchmark.
Put plainly, about one door in 43 we serve had an open collection matter, against roughly one in 14 across the benchmark. The second line matters just as much. When nearly every file resolves before it reaches an attorney, the owner avoids legal fees stacking onto the balance, the association avoids paying to chase it, and neighbors stay neighbors.
Speed improved too. Our average time to process a collection file dropped from about 23 days in August 2024 to about 12½ days in July 2025.
None of that comes from being tougher on owners. It comes from the habits in this article: a written escalation calendar, a monthly aging review by unit, and a clear line between who posts a payment and who can change a balance.
While you’re in budget season
Three things to put on the October agenda:
- Pull the aging report and read it by unit, not by total.
- Set a realistic allowance for uncollectible accounts in next year’s budget. Budgeting as if everyone pays is how boards end up surprised in July.
- Confirm that the person posting payments isn’t the person who can adjust a balance, and that waivers are going through the board.
And of course, if we can help, please reach out.