Community associations are Big Business, consider the following:
- More than 1.7 million volunteers serve as members of their community association board and another 400,000 participate as committee members. There are 230,000 annual association meetings with democratically conducted elections and another nearly 2.5 million board meetings during the year in which owners debate and shape their community’s future. To assist boards, more than 1.4 million committee meetings are held each fiscal year. The value, in the year 2000, of this volunteer participation was nearly $275 million. The dollar equivalent for volunteer time, using data from the 1998 Economic Report to the President, is $15.39/hour volunteered.
- Community association boards supervise the collection of more than $34 billion in annual assessments and maintain investment accounts of another $35 billion reserves.
- Associations provide shelter for nearly 60 million individuals in homes that have an estimated resale value of almost $2.5 trillion.
- These owners spend another $25 billion on internal home improvements and an estimated $85 billion on mortgage interest and real estate taxes.