Management of housing and communal services in apartment building: evaluation of alternative methods

The article presents a comparative analysis of the main methods of housing and communal services management in an apartment building in Russia: direct management of the owners of premises, management of a homeowners’ association or a housing cooperative, management of a management organization. The purpose of the work is to identify the advantages and disadvantages of various methods of housing and communal services management, depending on the various characteristics of apartment buildings and the characteristics of the owners of premises, which allows improving the methodological tools of organizational and managerial aspects of the activities of economic entities in the housing and communal services market. The author has compiled in the table a description of alternative ways of managing an apartment building in accordance with the Housing Code of the Russian Federation. The author gives an assessment of the positive and negative sides of each of the listed methods. The author came to the conclusion that the owners of premises in an apartment building, when choosing a management method, should take into account the satisfaction of consumers of housing and communal services as much as possible, should comply with laws, sanitary and technical rules for the maintenance of an apartment building, and should also minimize the costs of managing an apartment building. The results of the comparative analysis will allow the owners of premises and local self-government bodies to make a more rational choice of the method of managing the MCD. Also, this study makes it possible to highlight problems in the issues of control of management companies and further improve the regulatory and legal norms governing activities in the field of management of MCD. The results obtained by the author will be useful for drawing up various government programs that stimulate the processes of digitalization of service activities of management companies in the provision of housing and communal services.