Help with modelling for homeowners association

[btsibr]

I am working on setting up a CiviCRM implementation for my homeowner's association and was looking for some advice for how to model the 'entities' that
we'll need to work with.

We're looking to use CiviCRM for tracking volunteer interests, communications, residency status, and for architectural issue tracking.
As a HOA we have residents, homeowners (both resident and non-resident), family members associated with the previous.  People move in and
out of the neighborhood, buy and sell homes, etc.

Where I'm stuck is where to model the 'property'.  We have 306 homes.  Over time the owners and residents of a property change.  I was planning to set up households
and track current ownership/residency using CiviMember w/ two membership types (Resident and Homeowner).

However, for architectural purposes, we need to be able to view the history of applications, changes, etc for a property regardless of who the owner was at the time
but while processing a particular application we need to be communicating to the current homeowner or resident.  I was thinking we'd use CiviCase for tracking the applications
because there is a whole series of activities and deadlines associated with processing an application.  However, how do I tie the case to a property....

The options as I see them are to create the properties as 'Organizations' or to create a custom field.  Of course we have owners who own multiple properties...

Any thoughts?

[planetwebb]

I'm using CiviCRM for our HOA with 775 homes and wrestled with this for a while, finally I decided on the following:

1) Properties set up as Household contact type, household name is the same as the street address (i.e, 1234 Test St)
2) Created a custom field set to hold legal information derived from our local county database (lot number, plat number, owners name, annual due payment)
3) Primary address of Household is same as property address, billing address is for owners address (in case of rental or absentee, the owner will receive legal correspondence)
4) Contacts (individuals) are associated with the property by use of "shared address"
5) Activity that needs to be maintained for the property is logged with the household contact

So far, so good but perhaps you'll uncover something that I didn't think of...

Keith

[Erik Hommel]

Sounds like common sense, Keith.

I need to hold properties as well for a housing corporation, but can do this behind the screens as we have another system that holds property data. Both systems are synchronized to show the same information, but I do not have to have data maintained by users in CIviCRM. So I have properties as a separate 'hidden' table in CiviCRM.

[xavier]

household sounds good,

if you have often the same type of activities on the houses, you might try to store the properties as a case too/instead (that has for client the current owner) and store the custom legal fields on the case.