Residential Community Governance
Condominium boards, cooperative boards, HOAs, and the managing-agent industry that operates them. A multi-trillion-dollar sector with essentially zero regulatory oversight — and the founding test case for TASFGA's accountability loop.
Why this is Focus Area 1
The barber who cuts your hair needs a state license. The firm managing a $200M residential building and a $15M annual budget does not. There is no complaint registry, no disciplinary body, no continuing-education requirement, no bonding mandate, no financial-disclosure standard. One million New Yorkers alone live under governance structures with no accountability mechanism short of Supreme Court litigation — prohibitively expensive, years long, and out of reach for most owners.
Documented gaps
- No managing-agent licensure in New York (or most states)
- Martin Act oversight ended when sponsor-control ended
- 311 has no category for board misconduct
- AG's Real Estate Finance Bureau: ~5 attorneys, ~800 complaints/year, ~0 investigations
- Local Law 11 capital-assessment practices escape documentation
- Nine legislative attempts to create an ombudsman have failed since 2005
What TASFGA is building here
- Standards — model fiduciary, disclosure, election, and procurement standards for condominium and cooperative governance.
- Accreditation — a TASFGA credential for managing agents, binding them to a public Code of Conduct.
- Model legislation — statutory language for state-level managing-agent licensure and ombudsman programs.
- Scorecards — per-firm managing-agent ratings, per-building governance files, legislative tracking.
In-field reporting
Our on-the-record documentation of failure modes is published at condoscoopsnyc.org — building-by-building, firm-by-firm, gap-by-gap. That work is the proof-of-concept for every other focus area.