When your management company walks out the door, one job you may not have thought much about walks out with it: procurement. Somebody was quietly getting bids, checking that the landscaper carried insurance, and making sure the snow contract didn't auto-renew at a bad rate. That somebody is now the board. HOA vendor management — hiring, vetting, and contracting the landscapers, roofers, snow crews, pool companies, and other services your community depends on — becomes a board responsibility the day you self-manage.
The good news: none of it is complicated. It's a handful of habits done consistently. This post walks through the ones that matter most — getting real bids, putting the deal in writing, collecting and tracking insurance, and staying clean on conflicts of interest.
Why HOA vendor management is a fiduciary matter, not just an errand
Every board member sits in a position of trust for the association's money. Spending it well isn't a nicety — it's part of the duty you took on when you joined the board. That's the frame for everything below: when you hire a vendor, you're spending other owners' assessments, and you should be able to show you did it carefully.
Two things flow from that frame:
- You want to be able to defend the decision. If an owner asks why you picked a particular roofer, "we got three quotes and chose the mid-priced one with the best references" is a strong answer. "My neighbor does roofs" is not.
- You want to avoid even the appearance of self-dealing — a board steering work to a friend, a relative, or a board member's own company. More on that below.
None of this requires you to be a purchasing department. It requires a light, repeatable process.
Get more than one bid — and make them comparable
For any meaningful contract, get multiple bids. Three is the number most boards land on, but the point isn't a magic count — it's that you compared real options instead of hiring the first name you found.
Whether your governing documents or your state set a hard bidding requirement varies. Some CC&Rs and bylaws require competitive bids over a certain dollar amount; some states have procurement rules for associations. Check your own governing documents and your state's HOA/condo statute, and confirm with counsel if a large contract is involved — don't assume there's no rule, and don't assume there is one.
To make bids actually comparable:
- Write a short scope of work first and send the same scope to every bidder. If one landscaper is quoting weekly mowing and another is quoting biweekly, the prices mean nothing. Same scope, same units, same season length.
- Ask for references from communities of similar size, and call one or two.
- Confirm the bidder is licensed for the trade where your state or locality requires it, and that they carry insurance (next section).
- Get the number in writing, not over the phone.
Keep the bids in your records with a one-line note on why you chose the winner. That note is cheap insurance against a "why did we pay for this?" question a year later.
Put the deal in a written contract — every time
A handshake and an invoice is not a contract you can rely on. For any recurring or significant vendor, get a signed written agreement. At a minimum, make sure it spells out:
- Scope of work — exactly what's included, and just as importantly what isn't. "Landscaping" is a fight waiting to happen; "weekly mowing, edging, and blowing April–November, plus four seasonal cleanups" is a contract.
- Price and payment terms — the amount, what triggers payment, and what an extra or a change order costs.
- Term and renewal — when it starts, when it ends, and — read this part carefully — whether it auto-renews. Auto-renewal clauses are where boards get stuck paying stale rates. Know the renewal date and the notice window to cancel.
- Termination — how either side can end it, and how much notice is required. You want a clean exit if the work slips.
- Insurance requirements — the coverage the vendor must carry and keep in force (see below).
- Indemnification — language putting responsibility for the vendor's own negligence on the vendor, not the association. This is a clause worth having counsel look at, especially for higher-risk trades like roofing and tree work.
You don't need to draft these from a blank page. Ask the vendor for their standard agreement, then have the association's attorney review anything large, long-term, or high-risk before you sign. Legal review of a five-figure contract is money well spent.
Certificates of insurance: collect them, then actually track them
This is the step boards most often let slide, and it's the one that bites hardest. Before a vendor sets foot on the property, get a certificate of insurance (COI) showing they carry current coverage — typically general liability, and workers' compensation where they have employees. For higher-risk work, your association may want to be named as an additional insured on the vendor's policy, which extends some protection to the association for claims arising from that vendor's work.
Two things matter here, and they're different:
- Collecting the COI at the start. A vendor without insurance is a vendor whose accident can become the association's problem.
- Tracking the expiration. A COI is a snapshot in time. Policies lapse, get cancelled, or simply expire mid-contract. A certificate you collected eleven months ago may be worthless today. You want a live list of every vendor, what they carry, and when it expires — and a habit of asking for a fresh certificate before the old one runs out.
What coverage to require, and whether to demand additional-insured status, depends on the work and on your association's own insurance program. We go deeper on the association side of this in HOA Insurance Requirements: What a Self-Managing Board Needs to Know — read the two together, because your vendors' coverage and your master policy are meant to work as a system, not in isolation.
Conflicts of interest: the board member connected to a vendor
Sooner or later a board member will have a tie to a vendor — they own the company, their spouse does, or the "great guy" being recommended is a close friend. This isn't automatically wrong, but it has to be handled in the open.
The clean approach is straightforward:
- Disclose the connection to the rest of the board, on the record, before any discussion.
- Recuse — the connected member steps out of both the deliberation and the vote.
- Document the disclosure and recusal in the minutes.
- Still get competing bids, so the decision stands on price and quality, not the relationship.
Your bylaws may already spell out a conflict-of-interest procedure, and some states impose disclosure or recusal duties on association directors. Check your governing documents and your state statute, and ask counsel if a proposed deal involves a sitting board member — this is exactly the kind of decision that looks bad in hindsight if it wasn't handled cleanly up front. Handling it in the open protects both the association and the board member. For more on where personal exposure comes from and how directors stay protected, see HOA Board Member Personal Liability: What Volunteer Boards Need to Know.
The part that actually breaks: renewals and COIs that slip
Getting a good contract signed and a valid COI on file is the easy day. The hard part is eighteen months later, when the snow contract auto-renewed at a higher rate nobody caught, and the pool company's insurance quietly expired in May.
This is a recurring-obligation problem, and it's precisely the kind of thing a management company's back office used to catch. Self-managing boards lose track of it because it lives between meetings and between board terms — the person who signed the contract rotates off, and the renewal date leaves with them.
The fix is a single living record every board member can see:
- Every active vendor and contract.
- The renewal or expiration date and the notice window to cancel or renegotiate.
- The COI expiration date for each vendor, with a reminder to request a fresh certificate before it lapses.
Whether that's a spreadsheet, a shared calendar, or something purpose-built, the requirement is the same: nobody should ever discover a lapsed COI or an unwanted renewal by accident. Vendor management is part of the larger set of jobs the management company handled — our Self-Managed HOA Board Checklist lays out the full list so nothing falls through the cracks in the handoff.
Where BoardPath fits
BoardPath is built for exactly this kind of "who's tracking that?" problem. It treats contract renewals and COI expiration dates as tracked obligations — dated items the platform surfaces before they lapse, so an auto-renewal or an expired certificate doesn't sneak up on a volunteer board between meetings. And when a question comes up like "what does our declaration actually require before we sign a vendor contract?", the Boardroom answers it from your own governing documents, with the specific provisions cited — so you're reading your own rules, not guessing.
The villain here was never the vendors or the work. It's the quiet stuff that slips when there's no back office watching the calendar. That's the gap BoardPath is meant to close.
If you want to see how obligation tracking and cited document Q&A work on a real corpus, take the demo or apply to the founding cohort.
This post is governance education, not legal advice. Vendor bidding rules, conflict-of-interest duties, insurance requirements, and contract law vary by state and by your association's own governing documents. Read your CC&Rs and bylaws, check your state's HOA/condo statute, and confirm anything significant — especially large or long-term contracts — with your association's attorney.
— Eric Tetzlaff, CMCA — Founder, BoardPath