The board met four times before it voted. None of that was a click.

A community association choosing a management company typically asks for proposals, interviews a shortlist and decides at a board meeting, sometimes over several months.

Nothing in that process looks like a consumer clicking an advert, and a report built on clicks or form fills will attribute the win to whatever touched the board member last.

What does predict these wins is how the manager got onto the list — a referral from another board, a developer handing over a new community, a recommendation from a community's attorney or accountant.

Recording that source when the enquiry arrives is what makes association revenue attributable at all.

Once it is recorded, the report ranks it on the same fee revenue as every other source.

Rental management is often won one owner at a time, sometimes online, with a fee tied to rent collected. Association management is won board by board, with a fee per unit set in a contract.

Pooled into one ranking, the few large association wins make whichever source produced them look extraordinary, and the rental channels look weak by comparison.

Splitting the report by portfolio type gives two honest rankings, and they are rarely the same list.

Most managers find their best association source is a relationship rather than a campaign, which changes where the business development time goes.

Preparing an association proposal means a walk-through, a budget review and a presentation. It costs hours whether or not the board says yes.

A source that produces many requests for proposals and few wins is expensive in a currency no advertising report measures.

Keeping lost proposals in the enquiry file shows the win rate per source beside the revenue.

That usually separates the sources worth bidding on from the ones that produce price-shopping boards comparing five managers.

It also changes how a manager decides which requests to answer at all. A source whose boards pick on price alone is one to bid on selectively, and knowing that in advance saves the walk-throughs that were never going to be won.

An association contract bills every month and renews every year, and a community kept for a decade is worth many times its first year.

Ranking sources on the first year's fees understates all of them equally; ranking on fees over the window shows which produced clients who stayed.

Where the window is long enough, the report shows renewal by source, which is the figure that decides what a new contract is worth paying to win.

Nothing here predicts renewal. It reports what the accounts from each source actually billed, which is the number a manager can defend when deciding what to spend on winning the next one.