Research · Forty Years, No Measurement (1 of 6)
The Industry Asked to Be Regulated — and the Legislatures Said No
The popular assumption is that the trade association fought regulation to protect its turf. The documents say the opposite. It asked to be regulated, repeatedly, for decades, and it mostly lost — and the reason it lost is not the one the industry gives itself.
Two Mistakes, and They Are Mirror Images
Before anything else, two readings of this series have to be foreclosed, because both are available and both are wrong.
The first mistake is to claim the training works because everyone respected says so. Forty years of white papers, testimony, and best-practice guides assert that educated, credentialed managers produce better outcomes for the communities they serve. The assertion is plausible. It is made in good faith by people with deep expertise. And in every document this review could retrieve, it is offered without outcome evidence.
The second mistake is to claim the training does not work. Nothing in this research supports that conclusion, and any reader who leaves with it has misread the record. No study shows credentialed managers performing worse, or the same, or better. There is no study.
The defensible claim is narrow, and it is the only one made here:
The body of evidence connecting community association manager education or credentialing to any measured outcome — complaint rates, disciplinary rates, reserve funding adequacy, board satisfaction, litigation frequency, financial results, anything — is empty. Not thin. Empty.
A note on posture, stated once and meant throughout. A professional association that develops a standard and advocates for it is doing what every professional body in history has done. Medicine did it. Accounting did it. Nothing in this review found anything improper, and nothing here should be read to imply it. Never measured is a gap. It is not a scheme.
And the author's interest is proprietary in the most literal sense: I hold the credentials in question, and I would like them to be worth more, not less.
The Correction That Deserves to Lead
I held the common assumption myself for years: that the industry's trade association resisted regulation because regulation is inconvenient for the regulated.
The documents say the opposite.
Community Associations Institute has lobbied for manager licensure, in state after state, for decades. Its 2012 testimony to the Connecticut Judiciary Committee, filed in writing by its Vice President of Government and Public Affairs, states that CAI "will support a regulatory system that includes... Mandatory education and testing on fundamental knowledge of community association management and operations," and further that CAI "prefers the licensure of individual community association manager practitioners as opposed to licensure of management companies."
That is a trade body asking a legislature to license its own members. It is genuinely rare conduct, and it is to the organization's credit.
Its own explanation for why the effort kept failing appears in its Manager Licensing white paper, in one sentence: "state budget issues continue to be the biggest hurdle to enact legislation that creates an oversight board."
That explanation is where this research began, because it turns out not to survive the legislative record.
The Evidence Offered
What evidence has the industry presented, across those decades of advocacy, that the education it asked legislatures to mandate improves outcomes? This review retrieved the relevant publications in full — the licensing white paper in its original and November 2024 editions, the survey it cites, the best-practices literature, and the research foundation's complete current and archived publication catalogs — and read them against one question: where is the outcome measurement?
The white paper's citations
The original white paper runs twenty pages and contains exactly two footnotes, both citing the Foundation's own publications. Its foundational claim — "The purpose of professional licensing is to ensure the quality of services offered by a profession to the public" — is unexceptionable. Its evidentiary support for the program that follows is footnote two: a public opinion survey.
The survey with no credential variable
That survey is legitimate professional polling, fielded by an established firm, and it reports that large majorities of residents rate their community managers positively.
A full-text search of the survey for credential, certified, licensed, CMCA, or PCAM returns zero occurrences.
The instrument never asks whether the manager being rated holds any credential. It measures satisfaction with the product category, and it is offered as proof of an ingredient it never observed. That is not a criticism of the pollster, who fielded exactly what was commissioned. It is an observation about what the field asked to have measured.
The comparison assembled and never run
The white paper's most striking feature is its state matrix: every regulating state laid out by fees, renewal cycles, education hours, examinations, and bonds.
That is, structurally, the first half of the study this field has needed for forty years. Licensed states on one side. Unlicensed states on the other. The setup is complete.
No outcome variable appears anywhere in the document, and no comparison between the two groups is attempted.
The November 2024 update goes further and compiles complaint counts and budgets for the eight licensing states — and still attempts no baseline, no normalization, and no comparison. Its "Largest Category of Complaints" row reads N/A or Unknown for every one of the eight.
To be precise, because precision matters here: the industry does collect data. It has never run the comparison its own tables invite.
The best-practices methodology
The Foundation's Best Practices series describes its own method. Practices are developed "using a variety of sources, including, but not limited to, recommendations from industry experts," with outcomes including "case studies of community associations that have demonstrated success."
Expert recommendation plus success-selected cases is how a field records its folklore — often accurately. But studying only the communities that succeeded cannot establish that the practices caused the success. The crash data exists. It is simply not in the study.
The one comparison that does exist
Sweeping the Foundation's entire publication catalog, current listings and the archived catalog of its predecessor site, the single place a credential is ever compared against its absence is the compensation survey: "Salary differences between managers with and without professional credentials."
The field has measured what its training does to the manager's paycheck. It has never measured what the training does for the communities the manager serves.
That sentence is the whole paper in one line, and I would be glad to be proven wrong about it by anyone who can produce the study.
What Happened When the Question Left the Industry's Hands
The rest of this series follows the question into the statehouses, where it has been litigated for four decades. The pattern is remarkably consistent, and the missing instrument is the same in every state.
- Colorado ran the only licensing experiment in American history, from 2015 to 2019, and produced real mid-stream measurement — then destroyed the post-program complaint record annually under a routine retention policy. The experiment ran. Neither end was instrumented. (Part 2.)
- New Jersey passed licensure through both chambers by landslides, had it certified self-funding by the state's own fiscal analysts, and lost it to an end-of-session pocket veto. No veto message. No stated reason. Ever. This is the case that breaks the "budget issues" explanation, because this bill had cleared the budget completely. (Part 3.)
- California, the largest market, deliberately replaced licensure with title protection in 2002 after homeowner groups opposed a mandatory industry-run registry. The committee record summarizes the opposition's fear as "a monopoly-by-statute." An unproven standard could not win the confidence of the industry's own customers. (Part 4.)
- Texas has never introduced the bill at all. Not once, in a twenty-five-year sweep of the legislative record. Its real estate regulator states the resulting landscape plainly on its own website. (Part 5.)
- Florida imposed education by statute in 2024 — the most consequential competence mandate in this industry's history — and two years on, no evaluation of its effect exists or is planned. (Part 6.)
Maryland belongs in the list too, as the clearest picture of how these bills actually die. A standalone regulatory model has been introduced there eight times across nine sessions. The House of Delegates has passed it three times by wide margins — 118–14, 101–27, 102–32. The Senate has never taken a floor vote. Each House-passed bill expired in one committee.
That is not rejection. It is non-engagement, which is what happens to a question nobody can answer with evidence.
Why the Missing Evidence Is the Cause and Not a Footnote
It would be easy to read the state histories as bad luck — a calendar here, a veto there, a committee chair somewhere else. Some of it is. But a field that cannot produce evidence loses arguments in a specific and repeating way, and the record shows the same shape in every jurisdiction:
- To committee calendars. A bill nobody can defend with data is a bill nobody has to schedule. Maryland's Senate never had to vote against it. It simply never voted.
- To unexplained silence. New Jersey's bill cleared every substantive objection available and then received no action of any kind. A proposal supported by evidence is harder to end without a sentence.
- To the industry's own customers. California's homeowner organizations were not persuaded that a mandatory industry-run standard would serve them, and with no measured evidence on the table, nothing was available to persuade them with.
- To mandates written by others. When Florida finally acted, it acted on its own syllabus, from its own emergency, over the field's objection. That is what happens to a coordination problem the field declines to solve.
Reactive law is the most expensive kind of law, because it is drafted from the loudest anecdote instead of the field's actual record. A field that produces no record of its own competence has no rebuttal to offer — not to a skeptical legislature, not to a governor's silent desk, not to its own customers.
The Constructive Point
This criticism comes with a to-do list, and that is deliberate. Measurement is not a threat to the credential. It is the missing feature.
The first real evidence in this field is one honest research cycle away, and most of the raw material already exists — much of it already compiled in the industry's own publications. The comparison the 2024 white paper sets up could be run against its own tables. A single added question would convert decades of satisfaction polling into evaluable evidence in either direction. A turnover rate could be produced from data management companies already hold.
Whoever runs the comparison first will own the answer to the only question that matters in the next licensing hearing. Right now that answer belongs to no one, because nobody has gone and gotten it.
Related CIC-SC Resources
- Governance Standard EDU-001 — Manager Competence Measurement
- Forty Years, No Measurement (working paper, 2026)
- The Only Experiment America Ever Ran: Colorado, 2015–2019 (Part 2)
- The Bill That Passed Both Houses and Died of Silence (Part 3)
A Note on Sources
Every claim in this series is drawn from the working paper Forty Years, No Measurement: The Training Everybody Sells — An Evidence Review of Community Association Manager Education, Licensure, and Outcomes, in which each assertion is anchored to a retrieved primary source: legislative histories, fiscal notes, committee analyses, sunset and sunrise reviews, regulator statements, and the industry's own published documents. Statutory language quoted in this series is quoted as retrieved in that paper; readers relying on any statute for any purpose should consult the current text directly and take its application from counsel.
CICSC provides educational resources and governance standards. CICSC does not provide legal, accounting, tax, engineering, insurance, or reserve study services. Boards should consult qualified professionals for matters requiring professional judgment.