STEP 1
Build your profile
Firm identity, licensing, insurance, service area, portfolio, staffing, packages, and a structured fee schedule. It takes real work. That is deliberate — completeness is a published ranking factor.
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For Management Companies
Don’t pay for every lead unless you win it.
BoardMatch sends you qualified, scoped bid invitations from real Boards actively running a search. You pay nothing to join, nothing per lead, and nothing to be seen. You pay one match fee when a Board selects you.
No listing feeNo per-lead chargeNo pay for placementPublished ranking factors
You already know what a lead costs you.
You have bought leads. You know the pattern. You pay for the introduction, you call four times, two never answer, one was a homeowner who is not on the Board, and one was a Board that shopped you against four other firms who bought the same lead. You paid for all five outcomes identically.
This is the other way. Every invitation you receive comes from a Board that has completed a seven-step intake describing its community, its budget, its service requirements, and its timeline. The scope is normalized before you see it. You are not qualifying a lead. You are pricing a job.
“Bid up your lead prices to ensure a key placement in search results.”
Published guidance from the largest directory in this category to the Management Companies who pay it. On BoardMatch that mechanism does not exist — there is nothing to bid up, and placement is not for sale.
Why the leads did not close
A shared lead is a race, and the race is not won by the best company.
A Board member fills in a form on a directory. That contact is sold to several Management Companies at once, and every one of them is told to call fast, because on those platforms speed to first contact is the single largest predictor of who wins. So the phone rings within minutes, and it keeps ringing.
Put yourself on the other end of it. You are a volunteer treasurer. You filled in a form during a lunch break. By the afternoon you have six voicemails, four emails, and a text message. You did not ask to be sold to — you asked for information. So you do one of two things: you stop answering the phone entirely, or you talk to the first two who get through and treat that as the market.
Neither outcome has anything to do with which company was right for the community. The Board that disengaged never compared anyone. The Board that took the first two calls compared two companies out of the six who paid for their number — and the four who paid and never got through paid exactly the same as the two who did.
You are buying a position in a queue
Not a conversation. The value of the contact decays by the hour, and it decays fastest for whoever answers the phone.
The Board is being punished for asking
A volunteer who wanted a price list gets a week of cold calls. The rational response is to stop asking, which is why so many of these contacts simply go quiet.
Speed beats fit, structurally
A firm with an auto-dialer and a junior calling from a list will reach that Board before a regional operator with a PCAM on staff. That is not a flaw in how anyone runs their sales floor. It is what the format rewards.
And you pay identically either way
The contact that never answered costs the same as the one that signed. Across a year that is the entire spend, sitting against however many contracts actually closed.
On BoardMatch there is no race, because nobody can call. A Management Company never receives a Board’s phone number, and contacting a Board, a homeowner, or on-site staff outside the platform is a network agreement violation that removes you from the bid. Every question runs through the portal, every Board sees every answer at the same time, and the Board reads all of the proposals side by side on its own schedule. The company that wins is the one whose proposal is best when read beside the others — which is the only competition worth entering, and the only one a good operator reliably wins.
The difference is not the price. It is what you are buying.
A lead is a contact. A match is a customer. Those are not the same product, and they should not be priced the same way.
| Buying leads | BoardMatch | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | A contact | A signed contract |
| Cost to join | Often a subscription | $0 |
| Cost per introduction | Charged, every time | $0 |
| What you pay when you lose | The same as when you win | Nothing |
| What you pay when you win | The lead price, again | One month of your own quoted base fee |
| Did the Board ask to hear from anyone | Sometimes a form fill | An eight-minute structured intake |
| How many companies got the same contact | Undisclosed, commonly several | Every company covering that market, and you are told how many |
| What decides who wins | Who called first | The proposal, read beside the others |
| What the Board sees | Your pitch, alone, in your format | Your proposal in the same format as everyone’s |
| If you are outbid on price | You already paid | You owe nothing, and you get a debrief showing where you ranked |
| Cost of a year with no wins | Your full annual spend | $0 |
The honest version of the trade, because you will work it out anyway. If you reliably close a high share of the leads you buy, per-lead is cheaper per match and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it is not is certain. You commit the money before a Board has read a word you wrote, against a close rate you cannot know in advance and cannot control — because on a shared lead the thing that most determines whether you close it is how fast somebody dialled, not how good you are. Our fee is larger in one lump and it arrives after the signature, out of revenue the contract is already producing. You are not choosing the cheaper option. You are choosing which risk you would rather carry, and only one of them can cost you a year’s budget for nothing.
From invitation to signed agreement.
STEP 2
Get verified
You can bid from the moment you sign up — verification is not a gate on competing. It is a badge Boards see next to your name once we have confirmed your entity, state licenses, insurance certificates, credentials, and references. Until then your listing reads “not yet verified,” which is honest rather than damning. Verification is free, and nothing on your badge row can be purchased.
STEP 3
Receive scoped invitations
Unit count, association type, budget, services required, current pain points, decision timeline, and the deadline. Matched on service area, size band, and capability.
STEP 4
Walk the property, if the Board offers it
Many Boards offer scheduled windows or share the address for a self-guided look. RSVP and the address unlocks for you. Firms that show up win more often, and every proposal discloses whether you visited or priced from documents.
STEP 5
Submit a structured proposal
In a form, not a PDF. Base fee, term, escalator with its cap, notice period, onboarding, the full ancillary schedule, the named manager and that manager’s portfolio load, SLAs, technology, references.
STEP 6
Answer through the portal
Boards ask. You answer. Everyone sees the same answers at the same time.
STEP 7
Win or lose, with a debrief
If the Board selects you, we introduce you directly and invoice the match fee. If it selects someone else, you owe nothing and you get a win/loss debrief telling you where you ranked and on what.
No pay for placement. Named policy, published in full.
You cannot buy a higher ranking on BoardMatch. There is no sponsored placement, no advertising product, no premium tier, and no mechanism to pay a larger match fee in exchange for more invitations. This is not a phase-one position we intend to relax.
An auction is won by capital, not competence
If you are a 40-community regional firm with a PCAM on staff and 92% retention, a bidding war destroys you.
Boards can tell
A directory where the top result paid to be there produces exactly the skepticism that makes Boards ignore the whole list.
Auctions raise your cost to indifference
That is what an auction is designed to do. Every dollar of margin you would have kept goes to the platform.
It would break our own model
A fee structurally identical for every company means the fee itself can never favor one bidder over another. The moment we could be paid more to favor you, the report stops being worth reading.
Objections, answered directly
What does a lead cost me here?
Nothing. There is no charge to receive an invitation, submit a proposal, or lose a bid. Your only cost is the time to build a complete profile and price a job — and the proposal builder saves your defaults.
What if the Board picks someone else?
You owe nothing, and you receive a win/loss debrief showing where you ranked on cost, scope coverage, staffing, and technology, with the winning ranges anonymized.
How do you verify the fee I owe?
The match fee is one month of the base management fee in your own submitted proposal. You upload the executed agreement’s fee page within 10 days of execution. If the executed base fee differs from your quote by more than 10% in either direction, we reconcile.
What if we already know the Board?
Tell us at invitation and we will note the existing relationship. What is not permitted is contacting a Board off-platform during an active bid to route around the process.
Does the fee apply to onboarding or ancillary revenue?
No. The calculation uses base management fee only — deliberately, so nobody has an incentive to shift cost into the other lines.
How long do I have to hold my pricing?
Sixty days from submission, and it is not adjustable. A Board reads your proposal knowing the number will still be there when it votes. If your cost basis moves inside that window, absorb it or do not bid — re-pricing after selection becomes a fee dispute, and disputes are tracked against you.
Will a bad Google review keep us out?
No. You can link your Google, Yelp, Facebook, and BBB pages and we show Boards what is there, including the reviews you would rather they not read. None of it is scored. We take the view that a manager who enforces the governing documents consistently will collect angry homeowner reviews, and that punishing a firm for carrying out a Board’s decisions would be both unfair and a bad signal. What we do score is how the Boards who actually hired you rate you afterward.
What stops a company from going around you?
The fee attaches to the introduction, not to the platform. If BoardMatch introduces you to an association and you sign that association within 18 months, the fee is owed however the engagement was arranged. Boards record their selection because that is what unlocks their transition materials, and Boards pay nothing so they have no reason to help anyone avoid it. A prior relationship with the association does not change that — accepting the invitation is the commitment. The single exception is a Board retaining its existing company, which is a retention rather than a match and is billed at nothing. The full agreement is presented in your onboarding and lives in your company portal.
Can I see the property before I price it?
Where the Board offers it, yes. You will see the available windows on the invitation; RSVP and the address unlocks for you. Some Boards instead share the address for a self-guided look. Either way it is common areas only, and contacting Board members, homeowners, or on-site staff outside the platform is a network agreement violation.