Our Methodology

Principles

All data on CompareHOAManagers comes from official government sources. We do not accept payment for listings, do not include data from private or commercial directories as a primary source, and do not rank companies by anything other than objective data. Every claim on a company profile has a traceable government source.

Google Places Data

For eligible firms, we enrich profiles with Google Places data (rating, review count, map link) using the Google Places API. We apply a strict two-stage matching strategy:

1. Address match (preferred) — we query the firm name + address. We only accept the result if the returned formatted address shares the same street number AND first street-name word as the firm's registered address. Labelled address_match.
2. Name-only fallback — where no street address is available (e.g. Illinois IDFPR does not publish firm addresses), we query the firm name + city + state. We only accept results with a Jaro-Winkler name similarity ≥ 0.82 that fall within the state's bounding box. Labelled name_only_match.

A result that fails both criteria is recorded as no_match — never left blank. We do not fabricate or guess Google data.

Portfolio Matching

Where state registries include free-text management company names (rather than licence number references), we use a two-step approach to link associations to firms:

1. Exact match — extracted names are normalised (uppercased, punctuation removed, common suffixes like LLC/INC stripped) and matched exactly against normalised firm names.
2. Fuzzy match — unmatched names are run through a Jaro-Winkler string similarity score. We only accept matches scoring ≥ 0.88 (on a 0–1 scale).

Portfolio counts shown on firm profiles represent our best estimate at the time of the last data refresh. They may undercount firms operating under multiple trade names, and they reflect the state of government records — not necessarily today's client list.

Enforcement Actions

We collect administrative enforcement actions, fines, and disciplinary orders from each state's relevant agency. Where available, we display the case number, action type, date range, and reason. We only display enforcement data sourced directly from the relevant government body — not third-party allegations.

California enforcement data uses Jaro-Winkler fuzzy matching to link actions to firms. We verify the first word of the enforcement target matches the first word of the firm's canonical name before accepting the match, to reduce false positives.

Data Freshness

We aim to refresh state licence data and association registries at least monthly for active states. The generated date on each page indicates when the HTML was last rebuilt from the database. Source data may have been refreshed more recently than the page build date.

Reporting Errors

Government databases contain errors. If you spot incorrect data — a wrong address, a closed company still shown as active, a missing licence — please use our data contribution page. We review all submissions and update records as quickly as possible.

Editorial Independence

CompareHOAManagers is editorially independent. We do not accept payment for inclusion, improved placement, or removal of records. Management companies cannot pay to have enforcement actions removed. The only way to appear on this site is to be licensed or registered with the relevant state agency.