Running the Annual Meeting: The Night Itself, Hour by Hour

Plenty of boards get the notice right, send the proxies, and then run the meeting itself on improvisation. The result is a room that takes forty minutes to establish whether it has a quorum, an election nobody can reconstruct afterward, and an owner asking in January whether the vote was valid.

The notice and proxy requirements come from your documents. This is about the night.

Before the Day

Build the roster from record ownership, not the mailing list. Units sell, owners die, title moves into trusts. A vote cast by someone who is not the record owner is not a vote.

Decide how people attend and say so in the notice. Section 24 of c. 183A, added in 2024, permits meetings of unit owners by telephone, video or other interactive electronic means, provided participants can communicate simultaneously, and presence by those means counts toward quorum. If you are running it hybrid, test the setup in the actual room, with the actual person who will run it, before the night.

Assemble the packet: agenda, prior year’s minutes, the budget, the candidate slate, and the financial summary. Send it with the notice rather than handing it out at the door.

Appoint two tellers who are not candidates. Decide this in advance, not from the floor.

Check-In Is the Whole Ballgame

Set up a table and start thirty minutes early. For each arrival: confirm the unit, confirm the person is the record owner or holds a valid proxy for that unit, and mark the roster.

Validate proxies at the table, against the four things that matter — in writing, identifying this meeting by date, naming the holder, signed by the record owner. Rejected proxies get logged with the reason. Do not let this happen in the room while forty people watch.

Track quorum live, by beneficial interest if that is what your documents use. The chair should be able to say the number at any moment rather than guessing.

If Quorum Fails

Know the answer before it happens, because it happens often. Your documents set out what to do — usually adjourn and reconvene, sometimes at a reduced requirement. Have the adjournment language ready and the reconvene date already chosen, and know whether proxies carry over to the reconvened meeting, because in many documents they do not.

A board that adjourns smoothly looks competent. One that stands at the front debating the bylaws looks like the reason people did not come.

Running It

Call it to order and state the time, that notice was given as the documents require, and the quorum count. The secretary records all three.

Then move: approve the prior minutes, present the financials and the budget, hold the election, take new business. Give owner comment its own slot with a stated time limit rather than letting it run through every item.

For the election, state the candidates, state the method, collect ballots, have the tellers count them in the room, and announce the result with the numbers. Keep the ballots and proxies afterward — they are the record if anyone questions the outcome, and they should not go in the recycling that night.

After the Last Person Leaves

Three things, and the first two have deadlines attached in practice.

Minutes, written while it is fresh: time called to order, notice confirmation, quorum, each motion and vote, the election result with counts, time adjourned.

Officer elections at the first board meeting, then the trustee certificate recorded at the registry of deeds. A board that was properly elected but never recorded the certificate finds out at a closing.

Then the housekeeping: update bank signature cards, notify your insurance agent so coverage follows the actual board, and hand new trustees the governing documents, the reserve study, the financials and two years of minutes rather than just a meeting invitation.

Trustee Action Item

Two weeks out: build the roster from record ownership, appoint two tellers who are not candidates, test any hybrid setup in the room, prepare the proxy validation checklist and log, write the adjournment language in case quorum fails and choose the reconvene date, and confirm whether your documents carry proxies over to a reconvened meeting.

Discussion Question

If forty percent of your owners showed up and the rest sent proxies, could your board state the quorum number within five minutes of the scheduled start?

Why This Matters

The annual meeting is the one night a year when a board’s authority is renewed in front of the people it answers to. Everything that makes it go badly — the quorum confusion, the disputed proxy, the election nobody can reconstruct — is preventable with a run sheet and a check-in table.