Lauren and Wolf Peddinghaus are the owners of Haus Financial Services, LLC.

Lauren Peddinghaus wanted to own her own business for a long time. She just wasn’t sure what it would be.
That is, until she sold her condo and bought another one. She had been treasurer of the condo association in her old building.

“I turned over everything to the new treasurer and she was calling me all the time. She was completely overwhelmed,” Peddinghaus says. Wolf Peddinghaus, Lauren’s husband, had a stroke of inspiration. “He said, if she’s having these problems, there are probably others, too.”

And a new business was born: Haus Financial Services, LLC. The wife-and-husband team manage the books for condo associations – everything from collecting assessments to preparing the budget to hiring vendors to cut the grass at their clients’ buildings. Lauren Peddinghaus got her first client in February 2008. Now, they have 23 clients and have hired a part-time bookkeeper and a handyman.

Lauren Peddinghaus doesn’t come from a traditional accounting background. She studied radio, TV and film at Northwestern. She says that when she graduated in 1998, she took an administrative assistant job with a CPA firm to pay the bills. But she wound up staying nine years and learning pretty much the entire business along the way – everything from bookkeeping to marketing to setting up the computer network.

Her timing for choosing to go out on her own with this kind of service couldn’t have been better. The housing crash had just started. All the people who rushed in to buy condos during the boom years were starting to figure out just how tough communal living can be. And many were struggling to cope with shoddy construction and insufficient financial reserves left behind by developers. Foreclosures began mounting, leaving condo owners trying to shoulder the expenses of entire buildings with fewer and fewer resources.

“I’ve heard so many people say, ‘If I knew how difficult this would be before I purchased a condo, I would never have done that,’” Peddinghaus says.

So associations turn to her to do the tough work of collecting assessments from owners in their buildings. And that’s increasingly hard as people lose their jobs and fall into foreclosure. She works with attorneys like Ebony Wilkerson to collect from people who become delinquent. In some cases, they obtain a court order of possession. That allows the association to evict a delinquent owner and rent out the unit as a way of recouping unpaid assessments.

Haus Financial Services and Wilkerson are using that strategy in kind of a Hail-Mary situation – a 27-unit building in Washington Park that’s mostly empty. I produced a feature on that building for our series, Facing the Mortgage Crisis.

Peddinghaus says it’s the worst case she’s ever seen.

“This is definitely a special case with the extent of the foreclosure,” she says. “It’s a big project and we’re just going to take it a step at a time. Our goal is to help them get over the hump because there are still owners in the building. They want to save it and it just requires some financial help and elbow grease.”

She says they’ve agreed to work for free until rental income starts coming in. They’ve found renters for two units and have one more in the works.

Peddinghaus says she’s developed a thick skin doing this work.

“I’ve had lawyers yelling at me telling me they’re going to take me to court,” she says. “I’ve talked to enough attorneys and know enough now that I don’t feel afraid of them. Developers, too. I’m looking out for associations. I’ve become their pitbull.”