Setting up your community

Creating a community takes about a minute: a name, a city, and you are in. Your 30-day trial starts immediately and no card is required. Everything below can be done in any order, and you can stop after the first step and come back later.

1. Add your properties

A property is a home in your association. Almost everything else in HOA Grove hangs off one: dues invoices, violations, architectural requests and residents are all attached to a property rather than to a person, so the record survives a sale.

Add them from Properties in the admin sidebar. For a small community that is the fastest route — a few dozen addresses is a single sitting, and you are not waiting on anyone.

For a larger list, do not type it in. Email your address list to support@hoagrove.com in whatever shape it is in (a spreadsheet, an export from another platform, a PDF roster) and we will load them for you at no charge, usually within a day.

2. Upload your governing documents

Covenants, bylaws, architectural guidelines, the current budget and recent minutes. These are the documents your board re-sends most often, and putting them up once stops most of the email traffic. See Documents for how categories work and how to keep board-only files private.

3. Set up your categories

Violations and architectural requests are both organized by category, and you decide what those are. Ten minutes here saves you a lot of free-text later:

• Violation categories — the things your covenants actually cover: lawn and landscaping, trash receptacles, parking, exterior maintenance, signage.
• Architectural categories — the changes homeowners ask for: fences, exterior paint, roofing, landscaping and hardscape, solar, additions.

4. Invite your residents

Once there is something worth logging in for, send the invite link. See Inviting residents.