For decades, real estate data has centered on listings such as price, square footage, location and transaction history. While essential, these attributes tell only part of the story, particularly for the more than 77 million Americans living in community associations who collectively pay approximately $100 billion in annual dues across properties representing more than $11 trillion in real estate value under management.
Increasingly, buyers, lenders, insurers and boards are recognizing that how a community is governed and managed can materially affect property value, risk and long-term stability. Yet until recently, there has been no standardized, verifiable way to evaluate the performance of HOA and COA boards and the management companies that serve them.
As real estate technology evolves beyond listings alone, attention is turning toward non-listing intelligence. This includes data that captures operational quality, accountability and trust. The challenge is not whether this information matters, but how it can be structured, verified and transported across systems without fragmenting the real estate ecosystem. This is where RESO-aligned data standards may play a defining role.
HOA Doctor®, a Phoenix-based civic trust-tech platform, approaches this problem through a familiar but rigorously verified model: ratings and reviews. The platform enables verified homeowners to rate and review HOA and COA boards and management companies, focusing on governance decisions and service execution rather than individual neighbors or communities as abstract entities.
Unlike traditional review platforms, every submission is tied to confirmed property ownership and identity. This verification ensures that feedback reflects real stakeholder experience while protecting participant identities. The result is not anonymous commentary but decision-grade input from those directly affected by board governance and management performance.
When structured consistently, this verified ratings-and-reviews data becomes more than opinion. It becomes operational signal.
Structuring Governance Performance as Data
The platform aggregates verified reviews across five core dimensions: governance integrity, financial stewardship, maintenance reliability, communication and engagement, and emotional trust. These categories reflect the areas most likely to influence buyer confidence, operational risk and community stability.
The aggregated output is expressed as standardized governance-performance indicators, allowing patterns to emerge across associations and management companies without assigning regulatory authority or judgment. This approach emphasizes measurement and transparency rather than enforcement.
From a technology standpoint, the significance lies not in the platform itself but in the ability to treat governance performance as structured data that can be benchmarked, analyzed and compared over time.
Why RESO Alignment Matters
As new classes of real estate data emerge, transport neutrality becomes critical. The Real Estate Standards Organization exists to enable data to move consistently across MLSs, platforms and downstream systems without dictating who produces the data or how it is interpreted.
RESO-aligned governance indicators allow verified ratings-and-reviews data to travel alongside traditional listing information and other analytics. This protects MLSs, brokers, lenders and technology providers from vendor lock-in while enabling richer decision-making across the real estate lifecycle.
In practical terms, governance-performance data could inform buyer due diligence, insurance underwriting, lending risk assessment and board self-evaluation without any single platform controlling access or narrative.
Business Implications for Boards and Management Companies
From a business standpoint, verified ratings-and-reviews data can also support operational improvements. When boards and management companies have access to structured, credible feedback, they can identify recurring service gaps, prioritize maintenance more effectively and allocate management time where it has the greatest impact. Over time, this level of visibility may help reduce inefficiencies, improve responsiveness and support more disciplined decision-making. These factors increasingly influence affordability and long-term community stability.
A New Data Layer, Not a Disruption
Verified ratings and reviews of HOA and COA boards and management companies do not replace MLSs, listings or existing analytics. Instead, they introduce a new layer of insight, one grounded in lived experience, verification and standardization.
As real estate continues to evolve into a multi-signal data environment, governance performance is emerging as one of the most consequential and historically invisible inputs. RESO-aligned approaches may determine whether that data strengthens transparency and accountability across the industry or remains siloed and underutilized.
For business leaders and technologists, the opportunity is clear. Governance is no longer just a community issue. It is becoming a core real estate data problem, and verified, standards-aligned solutions are positioned to shape how the industry addresses it.
Bill McKay is founder and CEO of HOA Doctor®.
