Shortly after volunteering to be board chair of a five-building, 37-unit condominium in Hawaiʻi Kai, Mark Marabella discovered he was living in a time bomb. The 1970s buildings, like hundreds of others in Honolulu, are falling apart.
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” says Marabella, a senior consultant in quality improvement for the healthcare industry. “I get texts all the time about sprinklers, leaks, mold, wood rot, spalling — everything that’s going wrong with the property.”
Marabella inherited a pile of deferred maintenance issues and a management executive who didn’t keep lists of vendors, rarely answered emails and managed to give a $55,000 deposit for new roofs to a company without a license. The latter was discovered when the permit was declined; it took a year to get the deposit returned…