Touring the BPOA Website --Part Two: Exploring the Content Library
In last month’s Nuts and Bolts, we explored the Member Compass™, your personal dashboard area of the BPOA website. This month, we’ll be looking at the Content Library. Start by hovering your cursor on the Content Library tab. A drop-down menu with four options will appear: Rental Housing Forms, On-Demand Webinars, Rental Housing News, and Rental Housing Topics. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Rental Housing Forms, AKA The Forms Library: You'll find our documents and forms here. We've formatted most of our document content as fillable PDFs, but a select few are in Word so that you can customize them for your rental property. Do you need to write a lease? Conduct an RHSP inspection? Serve a Notice of Intent to Enter? Visit Rental Housing Forms! Our forms library houses almost every form and document you need to operate a rental housing property in Berkeley, minus the legal forms – we're not lawyers!
Pro tips: 1) Don't fill out a document while it's open in your browser window; you must first download it and then fill it out. 2) Get into the habit of downloading fresh documents from the website when you're conducting business. We update our lease annually and add and update forms as regulations change; don't risk using a stale document!
On-Demand Webinars: While members benefit the most from attending live presentations where they can participate in the discussion and Q&A, we understand that our webinar schedule doesn’t work for everyone. We record most of our webinars for playback and post them to the Content Library one week after the live presentation. From the On-Demand Webinars page, you can search for a keyword, such as Intellirent, or filter by the topics Free Webinars, Housing Provider 101, Owners Forum, or Rental Housing – our catch-all category.
Rental Housing News: This is where you’ll find our newsletter archives, editorials, and other rental housing-specific news articles. This week, I received an email from a member who hadn’t received a paper copy in the mail but was pleasantly surprised to find that he could access the current and back issues on the website. Do you want to look back at what Berkeley was like in those first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic? Currently, you can read newsletters backdated to October 2020, but we have a digital archive going back to January 2015. You can always find the current issue online, but one of these days, I’d like to make the annals available through 2015.
Rental Housing Topics: This tab has a submenu with six different options; Real Estate Economics, Insurance, Legal, Policy & Regulatory, Property Management, and Taxes. Click one to receive articles on the topic you’ve selected or click the Rental Housing Topics tab to see all of our rental housing articles in descending chronological order. As our website is still fairly new, not all topics are content-heavy – but we’re dedicated to continuing to work on making our content more robust while ensuring it remains current and relevant to Berkeley rental housing providers.