[stomachmonkey]

Happy Saturday All.

HOA related topic here.

For background I live in a fairly large HOA managed community.

We have pretty nice and extensive amenities, 5 pools, 2 fitness centers, Tennis, Basketball, couple of miles of hiking trails, 18 hole Golf Course, the works.

With the exception of the Golf Course all community facilities are maintained by our HOA contributions which is actually reasonable all things considered.

Naturally that mean every resident has full access to those HOA maintained amenities at obviously no additional cost.

Something that is a recurring bone of contention is personal trainers at the Fitness Centers.

There is a private for profit business, BB, who pays a fee, something ridiculously cheap like $1,500 per month, to use the community fitness centers to conduct bootcamps, personal training. Residents who want to work out with them obviously pay them for their services which is all fine so far.

Where it becomes problematic is it's an exclusive agreement with the HOA meaning residents can not bring in their own preferred personal trainer.

I have a trainer, he is also a resident so pays into the HOA same as everyone else.

I have to work out with him in his barely climate controlled gym in his garage either freezing or sweating my balls off depending the time of year as he is not allowed to train me at the community facilities.

If he and I were to go to one of the weight rooms as buds to work out together it's fine. As soon as it's deemed that he is "training" me it's a problem.

If trainers from BB deem training is happening they tell residents they have to leave the facility.

We have had instances of parents with their teens working out were it was deemed the parent was training their kid and been asked to leave.

As you can imagine that can get confrontational in a hurry and IMHO justifiably so.

We had an occurrence of this again this week and there is drama.

There are basically two camps going at each other over it.

1) I'm a resident who pays for the maintenance of the the facility and I'll be damned if a for profit company that was given an exclusive contract to offer paid training is going to tell me I can't use a facility in which I'm a fractional owner.

2) We love BB, they are awesome people who do so much for the community and their services are way cheaper and more convenient than going to Lifetime Fitness so everyone leave them alone and stop slandering them.

I happen to be in camp 1.

The frustration for camp 1 folk is we are not condemning BB, the business itself, we have a major issue with paying for a facility and not being able to use it under certain circumstance because of the exclusive agreement some prior version of the HOA saw fit to allow but the camp 2 people think we are attacking the business.

They don't seem to understand that BB is so price competitive because their operating costs are close to non existent. Of course they can offer low rates, they are paying peanuts for a fully equipped facility with no out of pocket maintenance or even utility expenses.

What they pay for using our facilities would get them an empty 1,000 sq ft space in the business park down the road with no utilities included and they'd have the capital expense of a full build out and equipment.

It's been coming out the last few days that BB's agreement is not the only one. The same arrangement exists for the businesses providing Tennis and Swimming instructors. I suspect they've flown under the radar as they've never confronted residents over it.

Most troubling is the current or some past HOA are the ones who have instructed these outside for profit businesses to report training / coaching / instruction when they see it occurring.

The HOA justification for all this is the pretty standard "liability concerns" which I call bull**** on. If I use a facility and injure myself because I used a piece of equipment incorrectly thats 100% on me. If I give my kid poor instruction on using a piece of equipment and he gets injured that also is 100% on me.

Admittedly it does get messier with paid trainers / coaches. You don't really want people using our facilities to drum up clients. Paid trainers should pay a fee to the HOA and should be properly certified / licensed and carry the required liability coverage.

And yes, controlling the number of paid trainers / coaches is reasonable to prevent over saturating the facilities.

Sorry that was a long way to get to my point.

Should for profit businesses be granted exclusive agreements to use facilities paid for by residents to the detriment of a portion of those same residents?

I say no.

What say you?