John Rabins
1/5
This is only the second negative review I’ve ever left online, but I’m compelled to do so for significant reasons. I’m the president of a condominium association formerly managed by the Olive Group. The primary reason we decided not to renew the management contract was there was a mishandling of the reserve funds that were being charged to each owner every month. The funds were to be placed into a separate account to build a reserve fund starting January 1, 2021, and since May 2021, those funds were being used to pay regular operating expenses without the consent of the Board and without any of the Association owners’ knowledge. As the Association was experiencing financial difficulties, the property manager should have discussed that with the Board before making the decision to use the reserve funds to pay normal operating expenses, something specifically required by the contract. Within the letter of termination, the Association requested financial and operational information from Olive. Before the contract termination at the end of November 2021, I retrieved three boxes and a flash drive from our Olive property manager. In reviewing the flash drive with our new property manager to ensure the requested documentation was present, we noticed that several financial documents, proprietary to other properties Olive manages, were located on it. Such documents included highly personal information that we simply should not have had access to. My concern, of course, was that if we were presented personal information we were not entitled to, how were we to know that some of our personal information had not been improperly provided to other owners? I asked Olive senior management to provide me assurance that our information was protected from such abuse as this. Additionally, I asked for a description of what systems are being put into place to ensure this sort of breach cannot happen again. After several queries as to the progress toward answers for these questions, I’ve not received anything from Olive, except an email explaining that the assurance is in our contract, and we would thus receive no further assurance. After I shared with them that the contract obviously wasn’t assurance enough, in light of what had transpired, Olive’s president emailed me (intending it for another senior manager), “What a jerk. Good to be rid of him!! Sounds like the end.” I wrote him back, “I’ve a strong suspicion this was not intended for me, but it speaks volumes about the communication security problems I’ve tried to share are pervasive throughout your organization. It is clear to me now that they start at the very top.” Is it any wonder I would strongly recommend against engaging this company’s services? While not as important, it’s interesting to note that over 50% of Olive’s Google reviews were written by Olive employees. In fact, only two of the positive reviews were done by non-employees.
