Interactive Brokers for Community Associations

Before commissions went to zero in October 2019, the visible price of a retail trade was $4.95 to $6.95 — $9.99 two years earlier. It was not the whole price. Margin carried a marked-up rate. Order flow was routed to wholesalers who paid for it. Mutual-fund 12b-1 fees sat inside the expense ratio, off every statement. Nothing was "free," and the customer could not see the charges add up. The product was thin to match: US equities and a handful of major exchanges, no direct market access, and no say in where an order went. Retail was not the lesser customer. The order flow was the product, and the broker owed best execution to the trader while being paid by the firm on the other side.

The modern version keeps the layers and moves them out of view. Selling the order flow became the revenue that replaced the commission, and the disclosure did not follow it: in December 2020 the SEC fined Robinhood $65 million for failing to tell customers what market makers paid to route their orders, and put the cost to those customers at $34.1 million in worse execution — after crediting everything they saved by paying no commission.

The model is not universal. Payment for order flow has been prohibited across the European Union since 30 June 2026, when the last national exemption expired under Article 39a of the markets regulation, and it is barred in practice in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. It remains lawful in the United States, and in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Of the nineteen jurisdictions IOSCO surveyed in 2025, nine do not permit it. This is a contested practice, not a repudiated one.

Where it is not permitted, the same firms bill differently. Robinhood's UK entity receives no payment for order flow and says so in its own regulated filings; its American affiliate declines the payment on UK-originated orders as well. Same app, same US venues. In the United Kingdom an options contract carries a $0.50 fee. In the United States the same contract is free, and the revenue arrives from the market maker instead. A broker that stopped selling the order flow would have to charge for the trade again.

What Interactive Brokers built

Interactive Brokers built the opposite, on three things nobody else gave retail. Transparency: every commission, fee, and margin rate published in the rate card before you click trade. Controls: institutional risk management, APIs, the same execution tools prop traders and hedge funds were already using. Access: direct market access to more than 170 markets in forty countries and territories, executing against the order book rather than a market maker taking the other side. The customer is the customer.

The bill is published. The product is dense and undecorated. Support is sparse — IB expects you to know what you are looking at, and for years it said so with a price: $10,000 to open an account, and a monthly charge for the gap between your commissions and a $10 minimum. The deposit requirement went in 2018. The activity fee lasted until July 2021, retired with the explanation that dropping it "aligns us with industry standards."

The margin rate is the clearest case. In August 2026, at a $25,000 debit balance, Schwab and Fidelity charge 11.325 percent and E*TRADE 11.95, against 5.13 at IBKR, on a Fed funds effective rate of 3.63. The benchmark is a pass-through. The markup is the decision, and it is a point and a half at IBKR against roughly eight at the other three. IBKR margins positions in real time and liquidates automatically, across every one of those jurisdictions, on one system. A margin loan is priced for the loss the lender expects to take. Real-time marking and automatic liquidation make that expectation smaller.

Then there is where the disclosure stops. Schwab, Fidelity, and E*TRADE each publish their schedule up to a $500,000 balance and refer larger borrowers to a phone number. Merrill publishes no schedule at all, and no base rate, in a thirty-seven-page margin handbook. IBKR posts every tier through $250 million.

Forty jurisdictions is forty regulators, forty rulebooks, and forty reporting regimes. That is the price of the access, and it is paid in engineering rather than in headcount.

Community association software

Property management software for community associations runs the old model in the same clothes. The dashboards are current. The three things are missing. Transparency: the subscription line is not the bill. Modules are priced separately, and per-transaction surcharges, payment-rail markups, and marketplace fees land outside it. Controls: logging an action is not the same as refusing to post it when a control fails. Resale certificates are assembled by hand from the software's own reports. CPA access is a PDF zip and an email thread rather than a token-gated read-only portal. Access: a monthly minimum on the module sets a floor under the smallest associations. The depth gap is structural — the engineering budget crosses multifamily rental, student housing, and senior living before it reaches community associations.

Three questions

Ask them of this platform and of the one you already pay for.

What does it cost, all in? CommunityPay is $1 per unit per month, with a $250 minimum, priced individually above 500 units. A 150-unit association pays $250; a 400-unit association pays $400. Every feature is included, ACH processing fees are passed through at cost, and we take no percentage of the money that moves. The page is public. Read it against your current invoice — the subscription line and the per-transaction lines together.

How fast is a resale certificate, and who prepares it? The association's manager, accounting firm, or staff generates it in CommunityPay from live ledger data, in minutes once the disclosures are confirmed, mapped to the statute of the state the association sits in. CommunityPay makes no per-certificate charge to the association, its manager, or its accounting firm. Several states cap by statute what may be charged for one.

What happens when a control fails? CommunityPay refuses the posting before it lands and writes down the decision, with the inputs frozen as they were. Recording the action after it posts is a different thing. A refusal costs a message. A reversal costs a reconciliation, an amended statement, and sometimes a lawyer.

Built for one category

A ten-unit association gets the same double-entry fund accounting, the same enforcement guards, the same statute-mapped resale certificates, and the same permanent audit trail as the thousand-unit association.

Yardi and AppFolio arrived at community associations from property management, and the association product is a module inside a larger suite. CommunityPay was built for community associations and nothing else.

Statute mapping does not generalize. Every state writes its own resale certificate rules — what must be disclosed, in what window, at what maximum fee — and the work is done one state at a time.

What the analogy costs us

IB's support is sparse because the product assumes you know what you are looking at. Ours is sparse for the same reason. The software looks like a financial statement, not a dashboard. Statute-mapped coverage runs state by state, and the map is not finished.

CommunityPay keeps the record and not the money. Assessments settle into an account in the association's name, and every figure we report can be checked against a statement we do not produce.

A board or its management company can download the complete books at any time — general ledger, journal register, chart of accounts, and trial balance, with a manifest that carries a SHA-256 for every file and the posted totals. No request, no export fee, no waiting period.

A difficult exit is the cheapest retention a vendor can have. We gave that one up. Every association here is free to leave tomorrow. They stay.