Unbelievable!

We had our fifth Annunal General Meeting today and it was all very strange.

No one had a problem, items were discussed and agreed on, Officials were thanked and re-elected,  sensible questions were raised (not voices) and plans were made and agreed by the majority for future investment for the Urbanisation. 

Wow what a result a Community working together ...... very very strange!

It really CAN happen.................if you wait long enough..................that a Community can work together ( mostly ! )

Yes I must admit it has taken some time and a large part of it is due to our excellent Administrators, but I am still reeling from the shock!

I think the administrator makes a big difference.  Denise, is your administrator male or female?

Thanks, just trying to prove a theory of ours.

Justin

She is female but works with her partner (male) who does all the accounts and budgets etc, They make an excellent team they came recommended and I recommend them to others.

Don't get me started on administrators.

A month ago we left ours with 5 simple tasks to carry out - a couple of letters, obtaining a couple of quotes for work needed, the usual stuff. As many of you know, I am no longer the president and keep trying to avoid getting dragged back into things, but the current president isn't exactly on the ball, hence I had meeting a month ago with the vice pres. & admin for the above matters to be actioned. And NOTHING has happened. I reminded the president to chase the admin, and the result was the wrong letter getting sent and various excuses for the other inactivity.

Without a decent administrator on board, the president's life can be a right misery. By the way, Justin - male.

One word of advice. Many members here are buyers of new property, and the subject of developer appointed administrators has come up often, usually with the same response, that this represents a potential conflict of interests and should therefore be avoided.

Our building is now almost 5 years old, and we are still findng out things we didn't know - such as the water pump sytem in the basement should be serviced regularly. Failure to do so can result in a €900 repair bill 5 years on. A good administrator should, in my opinion, be aware of things like this, and when taking charge of a new community, should do a thorough reccy of the property to familiarise him/herself with the various installations etc. Since the president is an unwilling and unpaid "volunteer", who usually changes every year, and is not elected on his/her technical knowledge of the inner workings of a modern building, it is ludicrous to expect them to be fully aware of everythng that needs maintaining. So unless the community is large enough to employ a dedicated maintenance contractor, the administrator really needs to be the one who ensures that nothing gets overlooked.

In our case, I now believe we would have been wise to accept the developer's adminsitrator (a sister company) at least for the first year, so that maintenance contracts or schedules could have been set up and all documentation (instruction manuals, warranties etc) could have been handed over by the developer without any problems. Being a sister company, I'm certain that they would have been made fully aware of all the installations and their correct functioning. As it is, we have an administrator who rarely visits the property, let alone knows anything about it, and a developer who is uncooperative, at best.

That turned into a bit of a rant I'm afraid, and was more than one word, but you get my drift?

Hi!

With ref to EOS team's question...'is the administator male or female'?

In our house we believe that men  'focus.'..    women 'multi-task'.!    (' believe' can be translated as ' after years of aggro this is the compromise we have reached' )

Are you in a similar 'situation'

 Regarding the question as to whether the administrator is male or female, from what we can see Spanish men tend to respect more a male administrator.  Having had 3 administrators ourselves, 2 women and 1 woman, this seems definitely to be the case.  Other people we have spoken to have noticed a similar thing.

Justin

Do you mean 2 women and 1 man?

I was wondering where you were going with this. I thought it was going to be about who actually does the job better, rather than how they are perceived by others. It may be true, Spanish men still tend to have rather macho mentalities, and as such, may not respect a female professional as much as her male counterpart, but at the end of the day, it's hard to respect inefficiency, whatever gender form it comes in.

Interesting!

We have had a mixture really, the prize p*** who was a cousin of the constructor, and then the very expensive firm we employed to sort the first mess out.  Both were male but when we indicated that we were going to sack the second Company they brought a woman Administrator in.  Although she was an improvement it did not alter the fact that they had to many Urbanisations to staff and also the opinion that the Community worked for the Administrator not the other way round.  Yes our new Administrator is female but as I say she works with her male collegue so in effect we have male and female Administrators.