LotWize's built-in Marketplace lets self-managed HOA boards browse vetted property management companies by state, city, and specialty, read real testimonials, and request an introduction — all without leaving the platform or calling a broker.
Most self-managed HOA boards eventually ask the same question: is it time to hire a property management company? The board might be burning out after two years of volunteer bookkeeping, or the association might have grown past the point where five neighbors can keep up with maintenance requests and delinquency follow-up on evenings and weekends. Whatever the trigger, the next step is usually the hardest part — not deciding to look for a PMC, but actually finding one.
For most boards, that search starts with a Google query, a handful of cold calls, and a stack of sales pitches that all sound identical. There's no easy way to compare pricing philosophy, service area, or community size specialty side by side. There's no way to see what an actual client said about working with a company before signing a management agreement that will govern the HOA's finances and legal compliance for years. The board is making one of its most consequential decisions with less information than it would use to pick a lawn service.
LotWize's Marketplace — a free, built-in directory of property management companies already running on the platform — replaces that blind search with a searchable, comparable, board-controlled process. It's a genuinely different way to solve a problem every long-lived self-managed community eventually runs into, and it connects directly into LotWize's governed Community Transfer workflow once a board is ready to make a move.
Ask any board member who has gone through a management search how they found their current PMC, and the answer is almost always some version of "someone on the board knew someone" or "we Googled 'HOA management' plus our city name and called the first three results."
That approach has three structural weaknesses:
No side-by-side comparison. A board evaluating three PMCs typically has three separate phone calls, three separate sales decks, and no consistent format to compare them against each other. Service area, specialty, years in business, and client feedback all arrive in different shapes from different people, making a genuinely informed comparison difficult.
No verifiable social proof. A PMC's own sales pitch is not evidence. Boards want to hear from communities similar to theirs — what changed after the switch, how responsive the company actually is outside of the sales process — but that kind of testimonial is hard to source independently, especially for a volunteer board doing this once every several years.
No connection between "found a PMC" and "actually switched." Even after a board picks a company, the actual handover — member records, financial history, vendor contracts, governing documents — happens over email and hope. There's no structural link between the vendor-selection step and the operational handoff step.
The Marketplace is built to close the first two gaps. The third is closed by the Community Transfer workflow it feeds directly into.
The Marketplace lives at /marketplace on LotWize's public site — no account or login required to browse it. A board member can search it the same evening they decide to start looking, without scheduling a demo call first.
The Marketplace's search interface lets a visitor filter listings three ways:
Each result card shows the company name, a short description, service states, community count, years in business, and top specialties at a glance — the comparison view that a round of cold calls simply can't produce.
One detail worth calling out because it reflects how the feature was actually built: the Marketplace doesn't show a PMC's exact number of managed communities. It shows a bucketed range — "1–5," "6–20," or "20+." That's a deliberate choice. The /api/marketplace endpoint is public and unauthenticated, and publishing a management company's exact portfolio size on an open, scrapeable page discloses competitively sensitive business information. Bucketing gives a searching board the context it needs — is this a boutique operation or a large regional player? — without exposing precise figures a competitor could scrape.
Each PMC's profile page (/marketplace/[company-slug]) can include testimonials that the property management company adds through its own settings dashboard — author name, quote, and optionally a date. This is not third-party review aggregation; it's testimonial content the PMC chooses to publish about its own client relationships. Boards should read it with that context, the same way they'd read testimonials on any company's own site — but unlike a sales call, it's available to browse privately, at whatever pace the board wants, before anyone from the PMC's team is even aware the board is looking.
When a board finds a company worth exploring, the profile page includes a Request Introduction form directly on the page. The board fills in the HOA's name, address, approximate unit count, and a contact person — no account creation required — and the request goes straight into that PMC's introduction-request inbox inside LotWize. The requester gets an immediate email confirmation, and the PMC reaches out from there.
That single form replaces the first cold call. The board doesn't have to explain who they are and what they're looking for to a salesperson before either side knows if there's a fit — the PMC already has the essentials and can do its own homework before reaching out.
A Marketplace only works if property management companies actually populate it, so it's worth understanding why a PMC would opt in.
It's a free, opt-in lead channel. Listing is entirely optional and controlled from /pmc/settings/marketplace — a PMC toggles visibility on, fills in company information, service areas, specialties, and testimonials, and the listing goes live. There's no placement fee to appear in search results.
Leads arrive pre-qualified. Because a board has to fill in the HOA's name, address, and approximate unit count just to submit an introduction request, a PMC isn't fielding vague "tell me more" inquiries — every request in the inbox already includes the basic facts needed to assess fit before the first call.
Only the right people can act on it. The system restricts who can accept requests and, later, accept an incoming Community Transfer to portfolio owners and admins at the receiving company. A junior staff member can't quietly commit the company to managing a new community without someone with actual signing authority approving it.
It's the on-ramp to a governed handoff, not a standalone lead form. A board that finds a PMC through the Marketplace and decides to move forward doesn't have to leave LotWize to make the switch official. The same board-voting, PMC-acceptance, and automated billing-recalculation process covered in LotWize's Community Transfer workflow picks up from here — the Marketplace is specifically how many of those transfers now start, by naming a destination PMC found directly through the directory instead of requiring the board to already have one in mind.
It's worth being direct about the feature's actual scope, because overselling it does boards no favors.
It is not a rating or accreditation system. There's an optional rating field a listing can display, but LotWize does not independently audit, license-check, or accredit the PMCs listed. A board still needs to do its own diligence — checking references, confirming licensing and insurance, and reading the management agreement closely — before signing anything. The Marketplace narrows the search and surfaces companies to evaluate; it doesn't replace the evaluation.
It only includes PMCs already using LotWize. This is a directory of management companies running their portfolios on the platform, not a comprehensive index of every PMC in a given state. A board's ideal management company might not appear here yet — the directory grows as more PMCs opt in, and coverage in a given city or specialty will vary.
Listings are self-reported. Company descriptions, service areas, specialties, and testimonials are entered by the PMC itself through its own settings page. That's normal for a company profile — the same is true of every company's own website — but it's a different kind of information than an independent audit, and boards should treat it accordingly.
The Marketplace is most useful at a specific moment: after a board has already had the internal conversation about whether to bring in professional management, and is past the "should we?" question and into the "who?" question.
Boards evaluating that first question — whether self-management is still sustainable, or whether the volunteer hours involved have become too much — should start with an honest audit of the time being spent. If violation walks, delinquency follow-up, meeting prep, and homeowner emails are consuming ten-plus hours a month with no relief in sight, that's the signal to start browsing.
Once a board has that answer, the Marketplace turns "who?" from a multi-week process of cold outreach into an evening's worth of filtering, reading, and submitting one or two introduction requests — with the actual handoff, when it happens, running through a governed workflow instead of an email thread and a check.
The LotWize Marketplace is a free, public directory of property management companies, searchable by state, city, and specialty — no account required to browse it.
Community counts on listings are shown as ranges ("1–5," "6–20," "20+"), not exact figures, since the directory is public and exact portfolio size is competitively sensitive.
Testimonials are added by each PMC through its own settings dashboard — genuinely useful context, but self-reported, not independently verified.
The "Request Introduction" form replaces the first cold call: a board submits HOA details once, and a pre-qualified lead lands directly in the PMC's inbox, reviewable only by staff with the authority to accept new business.
The Marketplace is the discovery step. When a board is ready to move forward, the same platform runs the actual handoff through LotWize's governed Community Transfer workflow — board vote, PMC acceptance, and automatic billing recalculation on both sides.
If your board is weighing whether it's time to bring in professional management, browse the LotWize Marketplace to see which property management companies are already searchable by your state and specialty — or explore LotWize's self-managed HOA software if the right answer for your community is still to keep managing it yourselves, just with better tools.
LotWize handles violations, resident questions, dues reminders, and meeting packets automatically — so your board gets its time back.
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