On August 20, Eclipse Community Management joined more than fifty exhibitors at the CAI Central Ohio Chapter Trade Fair at the Hilton Polaris in Columbus. The event sold out, and proceeds went to Honor Flight Columbus.

Association Manager Marcus O’Neal and I spent the day with board members, fellow managers, and service providers from across Central Ohio. Trade shows can look like a day of handshakes and giveaways. What actually happens is more useful than that, and it is worth explaining why a management company spends a day out of the office to be there.

What CAI Is, and Why the Scale Matters

Community Associations Institute was established in 1973. It has more than 50,000 members and 65 chapters worldwide, serving board members and other homeowner leaders, community managers, management firms, and the business partners who serve associations.

The Foundation for Community Association Research, CAI’s research arm, puts numbers to how large this sector has become. As of its 2025 statistical review, the United States has roughly 373,000 community associations, home to 78.1 million residents across 29.6 million housing units. Those associations collect approximately $124.2 billion in assessments each year and account for 35.2 percent of the nation’s housing stock.

Ohio alone has about 8,850 community associations, 690,000 housing units, and 1,659,000 residents. That is a lot of people whose largest asset sits inside a corporation run by volunteers. The professional infrastructure around that responsibility is not optional, and CAI is the organization that builds most of it.

The Credentials Behind the Letters

Board members see strings of letters after manager names and reasonably wonder whether they mean anything. They do, and it is worth being precise about who awards what.

• CMCA, Certified Manager of Community Associations, is awarded by CAMICB, an independent certification board originally established by CAI in 1995 and now operating separately. The CMCA is accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board under ISO/IEC 17024 and by the NCCA. It requires a prerequisite course or qualifying experience, then a proctored examination.
• AMS, Association Management Specialist, is a CAI designation. It requires at least two years of association management experience, two CAI M-200 level courses, the CMCA, and adherence to the CAI Professional Manager Code of Ethics.
• PCAM, Professional Community Association Manager, is CAI’s highest manager designation. It requires at least five years of direct management experience, the CMCA, all six M-200 level courses, a points-based application, and a case study completed on site.
• AAMC, Accredited Association Management Company, is a CAI accreditation held by the firm rather than an individual. It requires at least three years of management experience, a PCAM designee serving as the company’s senior manager, and at least half of tenured managers and manager supervisors holding a professional credential, along with fidelity, general liability, and workers’ compensation coverage.

Eclipse holds the AAMC accreditation. That is a company-level commitment, and it is the reason our managers are in classrooms and at chapter events rather than only in the field. It also carries an ethics obligation that shapes how we handle vendor relationships, a subject we wrote about in our guide to vendor selection and procurement.

Advocacy Most Boards Never See

The part of CAI that affects communities most directly is the part that happens quietly. CAI organizes volunteer Legislative Action Committees (LAC) that monitor state legislation, educate lawmakers, and represent the interests of people living and working in community associations.

Ohio has had an LAC since 1998, made up of homeowner leaders, community managers, and business partners. The issues CAI tracks nationally are the same ones that land on Ohio board agendas: reserve studies and funding, insurance and risk management, building and facade inspection, delinquent assessment collection, board member education, short and long term rentals, electronic voting and virtual meetings, and electric vehicle charging.

When a statute changes, a board usually learns about it from its manager. That manager usually learned about it through CAI.

Why We Show Up in Central Ohio

Eclipse manages 200 communities across Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky, and Central Ohio is where we have grown most recently. Several new Columbus area communities have joined us this year.

Growth in a market means very little if the people serving it are not connected to it. A manager who knows which roofing contractors show up on time, which engineers do defensible reserve studies, and which attorneys actually practice association law is worth more to a board than one working from a search engine. Those relationships get built at events like this one, not at a desk. More about our Central Ohio work is on our Columbus management page, and you can meet the team on our Meet the Team page.

Boards Can Join Too

One thing many volunteers do not realize is that CAI membership is not limited to managers and vendors. Homeowner leaders and board members can join their local chapter directly.

For a board, that access is worth considering. Chapter membership brings education sessions written for volunteers rather than professionals, a directory of vetted service providers, and a room full of people who have already solved the problem currently on your agenda. The Central Ohio Chapter runs programming throughout the year, including breakfast meetings and an annual awards luncheon.

If your board has never sent anyone to a chapter event, one meeting is usually enough to show why we keep going.

If your community is exploring management options, or you would simply like to talk through what professional management should look like, reach out to us here. We are glad to put together a proposal tailored to your association, and equally glad to point you toward chapter resources whether or not you end up working with us.