Every rule we operate under is published.
A marketplace asking a Board to trust it should be checkable. Below is each principle and the specific practice that backs it — not a values statement, a mechanism.
Principle 01
The practice: No sponsored results, no ad inventory, no premium tier, no mechanism to offer a larger fee for more invitations. Every factor and weight in the ranking algorithm is published, including the load-balancing rule that spreads invitations among comparable firms.
Principle 02
The practice: A Board’s intake is never sold, rented, or shared. There is no lead-buying customer and no data partner. Companies see scope, never identity, until the Board releases it.
Principle 03
The practice: Masked email relay, no phone numbers released, and a contractual covenant against off-platform outreach with a detection ladder and removal from the bid as the penalty.
Principle 04
The practice: A mandatory structured proposal form with a locked ancillary fee schedule and a three-state scope declaration — included, extra with a price, or not offered. No blanks.
Principle 05
The practice: State license numbers checked against the issuing registry monthly — DBPR in Florida, NRED in Nevada, IDFPR in Illinois, DPOR in Virginia, GREC in Georgia. Insurance certificates collected and dated.
Principle 06
The practice: A 180-day re-attestation cycle with a “fees last verified” date shown publicly. Stale schedules are flagged, then deprioritized, then suspended from bidding.
Principle 07
The practice: A company that declines to publish its manager turnover rate renders as “declined to disclose,” not as an empty cell. A blank lets a firm hide. A label does not.
Principle 08
The practice: BoardMatch does not manage communities and does not bid. We run the process and produce the comparison. The Board decides.
Principle 09
The practice: Every proposal is rewritten into one format with identical line items, identical definitions, and a three-year total cost built on identical assumptions. That is the product, and it is the part a volunteer Board genuinely cannot do on a Tuesday night. What we do not do is pick. BoardMatch does not rank companies for a Board, does not recommend one over another, and has no financial reason to prefer any of them — the placement fee is one month of the winner's own quoted rate, so it is the same formula whoever wins. BoardMatch AI will analyze the proposals, answer questions, and tell you what the arithmetic implies when you ask. It still does not decide. Your Board does.
Principle 010
The practice: Companies can link their Google, Yelp, Facebook, and BBB pages and we display what is there, unfiltered, including the bad ones. None of it touches the match score. A community manager enforces rules the Board adopted, collects from owners who are behind, and denies architectural requests — and the homeowners most motivated to post are the ones who lost that decision. Consistent enforcement can produce a worse public rating than no enforcement at all. What we do score is post-engagement ratings from the Boards that actually hired the firm.
The neutrality problem in this category
Search “how to change your HOA management company” today. Every article on the first page was written by a management company. That is not a conspiracy — it is who had a reason to write it. But it means a Board researching its options is reading advice from the parties being evaluated.
| BoardMatch | Pay-per-lead directory | Calling three firms | Consultant / RFP firm | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to the Board | $0 | $0, but you are the product | Time only | $5,000–$25,000 |
| Proposals normalized | Yes | Not collected | No | Usually |
| 3-year cost projection | Yes | No | No | Sometimes |
| Ancillary fees disclosed up front | Yes, structured | No | Found after signing | Varies |
| Calls after inquiry | None until you ask | Immediately, from several | You make them | None |
| Vote record for minutes | Exportable | None | Hand-written | Report only |
| Time to decision | 30 days | Unstructured | 2–4 months | 2–4 months |