What is Roam, and what does my association use it for?

Roam is software. Your homeowners association — or the management company that works for it — uses Roam to keep its records and send its mail. Roam is not your association, and we do not decide anything about your home, your dues, or your community's rules.

If you have recently had a letter or an email mentioning a company you have never heard of, that is the whole explanation. You did not sign up for anything. Your association changed the system it keeps its records in, and your records moved with it.

Your association already had it.

Associations keep a record of every home in the community and how to reach the person who owns it. That record usually starts with your closing documents from when you bought, and your association updates it over the years as people move and sell. When your association moved its records into Roam, your entry came across with everything else.

Roam did not buy your details, look them up, or find them anywhere. We hold them for your association, on their instructions, the same way a filing cabinet in their office would.

Most communities use some or all of it:

• Owner and property records — who owns which home, and how to reach them
• Assessments and payments — what is charged, what has been paid, what is outstanding
• Documents — governing documents, budgets, meeting minutes, notices
• Communications — the statements and notices you receive
• Requests and violations — maintenance requests, architectural applications, enforcement

Which of these you can see depends on what your association has turned on and what it has chosen to publish to owners. Two communities using the same software can look quite different.

Roam can hold the records accurately, deliver the messages your association sends, take a payment on their behalf, and fix the software when it does not work.

Roam cannot change what you owe. It cannot waive a fee, give you an extension, or overrule your board. It cannot decide whether a rule was broken, and it cannot tell you what your association will decide.

Those are not things we are unwilling to do. They are things we have no standing to do. Your association is a legal entity made up of its owners, governed by a board those owners elect. If a software company could waive one owner's charge, it would be making decisions for a community it is not part of, on behalf of people who never chose it.

So when the answer on these pages is "ask your association", it is not a brush-off. It is the only place the decision can actually be made.

Your association's records, because we store them for your association.

Our staff can open those records to support your association and to keep the service running, and that access is recorded. We do not sell your information and we do not use it to advertise to you.

If you want to know exactly what is held about you, or to have something corrected, ask your association. They control the record, and in most places they are the ones the law puts that duty on. We would have to send your request to them anyway.

That is a reasonable thought and it deserves a real answer rather than reassurance. A message about money, from a company you have never heard of, is exactly the shape of a fraudulent one.

Do not use the contact details in the message to check the message. Read I got an email from Roam. Is it real? first.

For anything about your community, your balance, a charge, or a rule: your association or your manager. See Who is my association, and who is my manager?

To see your account online: How do I get access to the resident portal?

If you are not sure who to write to, start with Something is wrong with my account. Who do I contact?