Recurring costs of a gated community

We have had a couple of car prowls in our neighborhood and now everyone is getting excited about adding a gate. I read a few old posts here and educated myself on how well they deter crime. I have a rough idea of the upfront costs, but I haven't seen much on recurring monthly costs.

How much do you spend on maintanence and vandalisim repair per year?

How much and how often do you need to reseal/stripe the roads and what does it cost? (we have about 2 miles of roads)

Do you have to maintain a reserve to cover emergency road repairs?

Also, has anyone added a gate to their community and regretted or loved it? I'd love to hear from you.

The cost depends on the scale of the installation. We have only two, single-arm, gates... annual maint. is about $1K per year.

The arms are deigned to break-away for those occasional impacts and are often reuseable.

Yes, we have more than one gate. The entrance and exit road is two lanes each way. The developer put in two entrance gates, one for residents and one for visitors. There is a single exit gate. All the developer installed gates are heavy, slow moving wrought iron - very attractive but not too practical. While the developer was in control we paid for gate guard service. The so-called guards were often asleep, spoke little English and were not worth the steep annual costs.

After transition to homeowner control we canned the guard service and installed equipment to completely automate the gate including multiple camera systems, a call box with remote answering service, and "chop arms" on the entrance gates intended to prevent piggy backing.

We currently have two preventive maintenance contracts, one for the mechanical elements of the gate system and one for the electronics. Those two are the bulk of the $8.2K with additional costs for on-call service when something goes wrong.

We also have a gate committee with enough volunteers so that once each month one volunteer is on call overnight to go to the gate and open it manually if something fails.

If we were designing a gate from scratch it certainly would be simpler and easier and less costly to maintain.

Instead of installing gates, have you checked into organizing a neighborhood watch program? It wouldn't be paid for by the HOA but it would involve the HOA members. I organized one in my neighborhood. The city provided us with a "Neighborhood Watch" sign at our entrance area for free. Our local police helped set up the program with us. They spoked at our meeting to give us information. The neighborhood watch costs very little or no money to maintain. It just depends on how much involvement the neighbors want to put into it.

Keep in mind it's NOT part of the HOA but another volunteer effort within the HOA. It's best to keep the two separated if possible due to many reasons. We were able to get more information out there whenever crimes occurred to help catch the people doing the crime.

Gates may make you feel a bit more secured but it may be false security. Knowing your neighbors and yourself is watching out for eachother may be the better long term way to address crime and preventing it.

Daryl

from what you have described it seems your "crime spree" is basically an opportunity spree. Most criminals want an easy, no hassle job and leaving your car on the street unlocked doesn't get much easier. I would suggest before jumping to a gate try to educate people to park cars in driveways or garages, have them locked and have security lighting outside your home. that would be an easier solution and honestly people should do that anyway.

Brad nailed this one! Our neighborhood, seemingly once per year, suffers from opportunistic criminals targeting unlocked cars.

Thanks again! I posted on our community forums that rather then spend a lot of money on a gate, lets start a neigborhood watch, lock our doors, park cars in the the garage or behind the fence when possible, leave outdoor lights on... everyone seems to be charging forward with the gate still.

I also asked if anything was stolen from a locked vehicle/house/shed and no one replied.

A few years back we had a car stolen from the neighborhood, the keys were in the ignition... We are very easy pickings!

I think the hardest part is the biggest gate proponent is a sheriff deputy. Ironically, he didn't say anything about locking doors, neighborhood watch... Just that we need a gate.

Daryl:

I used to deal with automated gates in the self-storage industry and have a few words of wisdom:

First, you should have separate entry and exit gates. A single two-way gate always backs up traffic. Separate entry gates for residents and visitors is even better. Visitors never have the correct code and all it takes is one to jam up the gates.

Second, entry should require some sort of key or code but the exit gate should open automatically whenever a car approaches it. Holding people inside against their will is a good way to be known as "Defendant." If you are not willing and able to wrestle an armed criminal to the ground and hold him down until the police arrive there is no point in keeping him inside.

Third, in the self-storage industry the number one insurance claim arises from the damage done by automatic gates closing on or against customers' cars.

Fourth, in spite of all of your best efforts and good intentions, some people who do not belong there will still manage to get in.

Fifth, most automated gates are run from a PC. When the power goes out, someone may have to reboot the PC. Who's the lucky guy who gets to sit around 24/7 waiting for that to happen? Also, your PC may automatically reboot after an update. (That happened to me once. The management company I worked for had set all the PC's up with a password, so the gates would not operate until someone manually entered the password. I learned that when one of my 24-hour tenants woke me up when he could not get in at 3AM.)

Bottom line is a lot of expense for marginal protection but lots of potential added liability and grief.

Larry's experience with gates is really useful to you, Daryl. We have one automated vehicle entry & one automated exit gate of our twin-tower urban 200+ unit HOA. The exit gate opens automatically. A security officer is stationed in a kiosk there 24/7.

Residents also have fobs to let themselves in, but the officer must let in guests for our secure visitor parking area, which is a part of our underground garage, but is separated from resident parking with an automatic gate, which the officer opens from the kiosk.

In the past couple of years, the gate has closed accidentally on 2 cars causing damage for which the HOA paid. During the past year, 2 residents have run into the entry gate for which they were fined, but the gate was out of commission for a couple of days each time.

Items were stolen from 2 cars several weeks apart in visitor parking a couple of years ago. In both cases the cars were unlocked and the items were visible on the car seats.

We had a power outage from about 4-10pm earlier this year so the gates had to remain open during that period.

The gates are indeed on our reserve schedule, and also must be painted every couple of years. We have budgeted $2000 for maintenance & repairs to these gates for 2012.

I like Tim's idea of a membership vote if possible. If your governing documents don't support a members vote, perhaps you can push for an advisory vote whereby members basically offer their opinions.

My experience so far with about 4 months with gates is they give the hoa and the property manager added control over the neighborhood. Anyone can follow someone into the neighborhood and bypass the gate, however we also added security cameras which deters most would be criminals.

I believe our community was having problems internally with tenants and guest who were stealing. Gates and cameras will drastically decrease this problem. Also if you have high turnover with tenants and typically these are the sketchy characters, having a locked gate forces them to get a transmitter, or key fob or sticker and register with the property manager. Manager has the opportunity to explain rules of community and obtain identifying information, make and model of car and license plate. When this is done you will likely have a more compliant tenant and their guest will be too.

I am guessing but most of the time the criminal is familiar with the neighborhood, either a tenant or guest who thinks they won't be noticed. If you have a reoccuring problem its probably internal. A true ousider driving through looking to steal will happen occationally but can easily be stopped by adding cameras.

My sugesstion is to restrip every 2 years and reseal every 4 years. 30k is about right on a tar reseal, however I would encourage you to look into grip-flex and liquid road. This is a rubber resealer that will cost twice a much but will last for 30 year and stay black if properly maintained.