HOA Case Files is the weekly podcast for people who said yes to a volunteer board and then inherited the building, the bank account, and the neighbor who replies-all.

We cover condos, homeowners associations, co-ops, mobile home parks and resident-owned communities, marinas, camp parks, and deed-restricted neighborhoods. Same job, different roof: collect the money, keep the place standing, tell owners the truth, and do it without turning every Tuesday into a deposition.

Each episode starts with a real case. A news story, a court filing, a reserve surprise, a vendor invoice that should never have cleared, a meeting that went sideways, an owner fight that ate six months. We walk through what happened in plain English. Then we argue the only three questions that matter to a volunteer director:

• What did it actually cost — money, time, and goodwill?
• What was the risk if the board did nothing?
• Was the fight worth it?

We do not do legal fog. We are not your attorney, and we will not pretend a statute citation is the same thing as a plan. We talk like treasurers and presidents who still have a day job: assessments, roofs, docks, reserves, work orders, minutes, elections, and the vendor who always has one more change order.

When a story turns on process — invoices nobody matched, minutes nobody can find, a vendor with no certificate of insurance, a vote that lived in someone’s inbox — we say so. That is also where SoShiny lives in the show: not as a commercial, as the counterfactual. What would a real ledger, a payable that needs two eyes, a work order with photos, or a searchable set of CC&Rs have changed? Sometimes the answer is “not much.” We say that too.

If you sit on a self-managed board and you want interesting plus useful — a story you can tell at the next meeting and a checklist you can run on Monday — this is the show.

From the team at SoShiny.com. Association software for boards that want less paperwork and fewer surprises.