Board members waste meeting prep time clicking through separate reports pages to answer one question. LotWize's Global Search lets a board member type a plain-English question — who hasn't paid, what did we spend, which violations are overdue — and get a real, data-backed answer in one box.
A board treasurer sits down twenty minutes before a meeting to answer a question a homeowner emailed the night before: "Has anyone in my section not paid since June?" Answering that honestly means opening the payments module, filtering by status, cross-referencing property addresses, and doing the arithmetic by hand. Twenty minutes disappears fast when every question requires a different report screen.
This is the friction that makes volunteer board service exhausting — not the big decisions, but the dozens of small lookups that interrupt every week. LotWize's Global Search, at /board/search on the Pro and PMC plans, collapses that friction into a single search box. Type a question in plain English, and the system answers it from real, live data — not a canned response.
Most HOA software treats search as an afterthought: a filter box bolted onto each individual report page. Want to know which vendors service the community? Open the vendor page and scroll. Want last month's landscaping spend? Open the expense ledger and filter by category.
Each of these is a reasonable page on its own, but a board member's actual question rarely lines up with any single page. "Who owes us money and how much" spans payments and properties. A board member who doesn't remember which of seven navigation items holds the answer ends up guessing, clicking, and backing out — exactly the kind of busywork that drives volunteer board burnout.
Global Search is designed around the question a board member actually has, not the page structure of the software.
The interface is a single search field. As a board member types, the query debounces for 300 milliseconds, then hits LotWize's search API, which checks whether the text looks like a natural-language question or an ordinary keyword.
For a keyword — a property address, a vendor name, a homeowner's last name — the system runs a case-insensitive substring match across seven record types at once: properties, members, violations, expenses, meetings, documents, and vendors. Results come back grouped by type, each linking straight to the underlying record — a matched violation to /board/violations/[id], a matched property to /board/properties/[id]. There's no separate search page per module to remember.
For a question — something with a question word and more than a couple of words, like "who hasn't paid since June" — the system does something more useful than a substring match: it classifies the question and answers it with a real query against the association's actual data.
Under the hood, Global Search runs a lightweight intent classifier on any query that looks like a question. It sends the query to Claude Haiku with a tight instruction set: classify this into one of three structured intents — a search for delinquent homeowners, an expense summary, or a search for overdue violations — or fall back to ordinary keyword search if the question doesn't fit one of those shapes.
Once the intent is classified, LotWize runs a real SQL query against the association's data, scoped to the organization asking:
If the AI classification fails for any reason — a timeout, an unparseable response, a genuinely ambiguous question — the search silently falls back to the same keyword match every other query gets. A board member never sees an error state; worst case, they get ordinary search results instead of a synthesized answer. That fallback means the feature can only make search better, never break it.
LotWize already has a separate AI assistant for open-ended homeowner and board questions, built for conversational back-and-forth. Global Search is deliberately narrower — no conversation history, no follow-up handling, no personality. It's a search box that understands three specific, high-frequency question shapes and otherwise behaves exactly like the keyword search a board member already expects.
That narrowness is the point. A board member doesn't want a conversation to find out who's delinquent; they want the answer in the time it takes to type the question. Constraining the AI layer to three well-defined intents, backed by real SQL rather than free-form generation, means the answers are numbers pulled directly from the ledger — not a paraphrase of what a language model thinks might be true.
Every query — keyword or natural-language — is filtered to the requesting board's organization at the database level before results are assembled. There's no cross-community leakage: a board member at one HOA cannot search their way into another association's expenses or violations, regardless of how the query is phrased. Document results are further filtered to resident-visible documents, so a search never surfaces internal board-only files.
The feature is also strictly read-only. Nothing about typing a question into Global Search changes a record — there's no path from "how much did we spend on landscaping" to accidentally editing an expense. Making changes still goes through the normal expense, violation, and payment workflows, with their usual audit trail.
The clearest place Global Search earns its keep is the fifteen minutes before a board meeting. Instead of opening four browser tabs — payments, expenses, violations, vendors — a board member can run through the questions the agenda actually raises:
| Question typed | What comes back |
|---|---|
| "who hasn't paid since June" | Properties with outstanding balances, owner names, and total owed |
| "how much did we spend on pool repairs" | Total spend on the matched category plus the underlying expense lines |
| "which violations are overdue" | Every violation with a notice sent and no resolution, linked directly |
| "smith" | Every matching member, property, or vendor record with "smith" in it |
The first three are natural-language questions answered with synthesized totals; the fourth is an ordinary keyword lookup. Both paths run through the same search box, and a board member never has to decide in advance which kind of question they're asking.
Global Search is bundled with LotWize's Pro plan ($149/month, or $99/month on Hybrid Pro where homeowners cover a 1% assessment fee), which supports self-managed associations up to 300 units, and with every PMC plan. Starter and Growth tier associations still get the full reports suite — just without the unified search box layered on top.
Global Search at
/board/searchunifies keyword search across properties, members, violations, expenses, meetings, documents, and vendors into a single box.Natural-language questions — who hasn't paid, what did we spend, which violations are overdue — are classified by AI and answered with real SQL queries against the association's own data, not a generic response.
Every query is scoped to the requesting board's organization, and the feature is strictly read-only — it answers questions, it never changes records.
If AI classification fails for any reason, the search falls back silently to ordinary keyword matching, so the feature can only improve results, never break them.
Global Search is included on the Pro and PMC plans, aimed at boards spending real time assembling numbers by hand before meetings.
Global Search is a unified search feature at /board/search that lets board members search across properties, members, violations, expenses, meetings, documents, and vendors from one box, and ask plain-English questions that get answered with real data from the association's own records.
It queries real data. Question-style searches are classified into one of three intents by Claude Haiku, and each intent runs an actual SQL query — summing balances or expenses, or counting open violations — against the association's database, rather than generating an answer from general knowledge.
No to both. Every query is filtered to the requesting user's organization at the database level, and the feature is strictly read-only — there is no path from a search to writing or modifying a record.
The Pro plan ($149/month, or $99/month on Hybrid Pro) and all PMC (property management company) plans. Starter and Growth plans include the full underlying reports without the unified search layer.
Stop opening four tabs to answer one board question. Start a free LotWize trial to try Global Search against your own community's data, or see how it fits alongside the rest of the board toolkit in our guide to 15 HOA tasks boards should automate.
LotWize handles violations, resident questions, dues reminders, and meeting packets automatically — so your board gets its time back.
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