Security Guards for HOAs & Residential Communities

How a post is set up with an association

An association post starts with a call to dispatch, a walk of the property with the community manager and, where the board wants it, a director, and post orders written before the first shift. Dispatch asks for the parts of the governing documents an officer will actually have to apply: the gate policy and who may add a visitor, the contractor hours, the pool rules and the guest limit, the parking policy on streets the association owns and who can authorize a tow, the no-solicitation rule, and what the board wants done when a homeowner brings a complaint to the guardhouse instead of the office. It also asks who to call after hours, because on most association posts the office is closed and the manager is the escalation path.

The post orders that come out of that conversation are approved by the manager, kept at the post and read by every officer before a first shift. They change when the rules change, when the pool opens, when a gate is replaced, and they are reviewed with the manager on a schedule rather than left until something goes wrong.

Contracting on the board’s calendar

Associations buy security on a calendar the board sets: the budget is adopted in the fall, contracts are renewed at the turn of the year, pool coverage is decided in the spring. A proposal from Price Protection is written so a board can vote on it in one reading: the post type, the hours per week, the hourly rate, the start date, and what an added shift or a holiday costs. Where the manager has spending authority, coverage can begin before the next meeting; when a gate has failed or a contract has lapsed, unarmed officers are usually on the post within hours of the call. Changes are made by the manager in writing so the post orders, the schedule and the invoice always match what the board approved.

Seasons on an association calendar

Spring brings the pool opening, roofing crews after hail and landscaping contractors at every gate. Summer is the pool, long evenings, clubhouse rentals and the Fourth of July. Hurricane season runs June through November, and the post orders say what the officer does when the power fails, the gate operator drops and the streets fill with debris and with residents who did not leave. Fall is the budget, Halloween traffic and holiday lights; winter is package deliveries, homes empty for the holidays and the freeze weeks when a burst pipe shows as water running down a driveway at three in the morning. Coverage is planned around that year, and the post orders carry a section for each part of it.

The record behind the board packet

An association pays for hours of presence, and the daily report is how the manager and the board see how those hours were used: rounds with times, entries at the gate, contractors in and out, amenity closings, gate faults, complaints taken at the window and incidents with their own written report. Managers draw the monthly summary for the board packet from it, pull a single day when a homeowner disputes a refusal at the gate, and hand it to counsel when the association is asked what it did about a complaint. Every officer’s work is reviewed against that report daily, so a skipped round or a gate left on codes is caught inside the company before a director hears of it.

Find your community type below

Each property type has its own page below, because the post at a staffed guardhouse is not the post on a neighborhood patrol, and the questions a condominium board asks are not the questions a master association manager asks. Every page covers that community’s risks, the services that apply, a typical shift, what the report records and the questions boards put to us. If yours is not on the list, request a proposal and describe it; we write post orders for the property in front of us, not for a category.