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A company that builds software for homeowners’ associations, PayHOA, has landed a Series A funding round of $27.5 million, Inman learned in a May 15 press release.
Venture Capital firm Elephant led the round, which coincided with PayHOA’s rollout of a comprehensive payment execution and oversight solution. The software aims to bolster how self-managed associations and property managers work with their communities, teams and residents.
Funds will be put toward general strengthening of the product, funneled to new feature engineering, increases in support models and spark the development of voting capabilities.
Hiring in sales, marketing and product development is planned. PayHOA forecasts a staffing increase of 40 percent is needed to accommodate the expansion, according to the release.
Mike Bollinger, founder and CEO of PayHOA, said in a statement that functioning in a leadership role on a volunteer board is often a thankless, challenging role. The right software solution can offer stability and transparency.
“Our mission at PayHOA is to eliminate the need for the jumble of disconnected tools used for tasks like accounting, documents, violations and homeowners’ requests,” Bollinger said. “With our user-friendly, all-in-one platform, HOAs gain a central hub to connect directly with residents, fostering happier and more efficient communities.”
PayHOA offers a web-based experience for maintenance requests, communications and financial exchanges. It allows records to be managed and reconciled more accurately and establishes a fundamental “agent of record” for how a board operates.
The company states that more than 620,000 homeowners in the United States rely on its features to interact with their volunteer and self-managed HOA boards, including some in Puerto Rico. PayHOA’s goal is to help boards operate with the same capabilities as much larger, corporate HOA management firms, as well as avoid building a fragmented tech stack or using non-specialty software applications.
The newly released payments functionality will engage OCR (optical character recognition), or text-scanning, to import invoices and transport financial data to appropriate channels and automate spending and payment approval notifications, among other functions.
While the venture capital pipeline into proptech has been constricted when compared to the market cycles before 2022, money is available for firms that can show profits and a positive long-term outlook. Inman reported this week that Honey Homes, a subscription home services company, doubled its Series A with an additional $9.25 million and that companies offering innovation in property management are being eyed by Wall Street, like PayHOA.
The proportion of deals around property management and transaction solutions increased in 2023, which may indicate where firms will continue to invest moving deeper into 2024, an April industry report by Valley Bank said
“This focus suggests that firms were prioritizing cost-saving and revenue-boosting implementations to costly, lengthy digital processes via automation,” the report stated. “Physical property management, deployment of energy-saving devices and analytics packages also were prioritized.”
Lexington, Kentucky-based PayHOA was founded in 2018.
