Meet the Team
The people behind SMA. We care about getting the details right, and we bring our whole selves to every project: curious, collaborative, and a little obsessed with doing great work.
Erik Sundquist, RS Managing Partner
Erik Sundquist has spent his career obsessed with a deceptively simple question: how do you keep a community financially healthy for the long haul? After more than 25 years as a custom home builder and residential developer, he knows exactly what it costs when a roof, a boiler, or an elevator reaches the end of its life, because he has built and replaced plenty of them himself.
He has been preparing reserve studies since 2009 and holds the Reserve Specialist (RS) designation through the Community Associations Institute, plus a degree from UC Berkeley. But what really drives Erik is a frustration with the status quo. Most boards lean on a single number, percent funded, to judge their financial health, and Erik believes that number hides as much as it reveals. A community can look great on paper while three major components quietly age toward failure in the same five year window.
That conviction became the seed of ReserveScore™. Erik championed the idea of a fuller, more honest measure of reserve health, and together with his team he has been shaping it into something real, along with the ReserveScore™ Simulator, a tool that lets boards see the consequences of their decisions before they make them. It is reserve planning with the lights on. His ambition for it is bigger still: to turn reserve benchmarking into a shared language that boards, lenders, and insurers can all speak.
Erik is the person who can take a wall of numbers and make it make sense, usually with a story, occasionally with a healthy dose of "here is what nobody is telling you." He writes regularly for the industry, and when he is not deep in a funding plan, he is probably thinking about the next way to make reserve studies smarter.
Away from the work, you will find Erik with drumsticks, a script, a paintbrush, or a soccer match on. He gave up playing soccer a while back, but the passion for it, like everything else he loves, never left.
Paul Solby, Partner
Paul Solby came to reserve studies the long way around. Before he was one of California's most trusted appraisers, he spent more than 15 years as a business executive for major and minor league sports franchises, where he learned how to read a room, run an operation, and keep a complicated enterprise moving. It turns out those skills translate beautifully to an industry that lives and dies by accurate numbers and trust.
A State Licensed Appraiser for over 18 years, Paul joined SMA Reserves as a Partner in 2017 and quickly became the backbone of how the firm gets things right. Replacement cost valuation is his craft, and he has practiced it across California, Colorado, and New Mexico, building the kind of cost knowledge that lets SMA Reserves stand behind every number it puts on paper. As Lead Inspector, he is the one in the field making sure the analysis reflects the building as it actually is, not as a spreadsheet assumes it to be.
Paul also leads funding plan formulation, turning intimidating financial projections into plans a board can understand, approve, and actually follow. And this is where his real gift shows: Paul never loses sight of how boards and managers actually think. He knows the pressures they face, the questions they will ask, and the difference between a plan that looks good in a report and one that survives a real board meeting. That realism is the filter he runs everything through. Whether SMA Reserves is refining a report, building a new tool, or shaping how it talks to clients, Paul is the one asking the grounding question: will this actually work for the people who have to use it?
A Boston University graduate with a sports executive's ease and an appraiser's precision, Paul is the rare partner who is as comfortable talking strategy as he is walking a property to assess the true condition of its mechanical systems firsthand. As SMA Reserves works to make ReserveScore™ and benchmarking an industry standard, his realism and his deep relationships across the appraisal and lending world put him right at the heart of where the firm is headed.
A lifelong hockey player and fan, Paul still laces up the skates, though he will be the first to admit the bruises land harder and linger longer than they used to. He plays on anyway, which tells you most of what you need to know about how he approaches everything else.
Robert Solby approaches a property the way a good athlete approaches a game: prepared, competitive, and paying attention to the details everyone else misses. An MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Robert has been performing on site inspections for SMA Reserves since 2021, bringing a sharp analytical mind to work that rewards exactly that. Based in Walnut Creek, he does not just record what he sees, he reads it.
His background in budget and statistical analysis, paired with replacement cost research, means Robert is already thinking a few moves ahead while he is documenting a property. Where a component sits in its lifecycle, what it will realistically cost to replace, how it all fits the bigger financial picture: those are the questions running in the background as he works. That instinct for turning observation into insight is exactly the kind of thinking that powers SMA's move toward benchmarking and reserve intelligence.
Robert also, fittingly, wrote SMA's on site inspector job description, the playbook the rest of the team runs on. It is a very Robert thing to do: see how the role should work, then put it down on paper so everyone can play at the same level. Detail oriented, competitive in the best sense, and genuinely good with the people he meets on site, he is the kind of inspector who makes the whole report stronger.
Kyle Sundquist, Reserve Study Inspector
Robert Solby, Reserve Study Inspector
Kyle Sundquist looks at a building the way a climber reads a rock face: as a system, with a clear eye for where the stress points are and what is going to give first. A UC Berkeley graduate in Conservation and Resource Studies, he came to reserve work with a natural feel for how things age, wear, and fit together over time, which happens to be exactly the right way to think about a community's physical assets. Based in Oakland, Kyle is the one on the ground turning what a property actually is into data the whole team can trust.
His inspections are where every reserve study begins. Kyle reviews the prior study, the site maps, and the component list before he ever sets foot on site, then walks the property documenting the real condition of every component and flagging the ones quietly wearing out ahead of schedule. That fieldwork is the foundation the entire analysis stands on, and increasingly it is the raw material behind SMA's benchmarking and ReserveScore™ work. A study is only as honest as its inputs, and Kyle's are clean.
An avid climber, surfer, and golfer, he has a patience and attention to detail that show up in both pursuits and in his work. Whether he is reading a green or a roofline, Kyle is good at seeing the long game, which is precisely what you want in the person setting the baseline for a community's financial future.
Our Story
After completing his Business degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Stephen Martin learned the inner workings of community property management by working for two prominent firms in the 2000’s. In his late 20s, and in the midst of the recession, Stephen Martin parlayed his job as a property manager into a niche business - calculating costs, and reserve fund planning for common interest community associations. SMA California was born, and at the age of only 30, his fledgling business started to take off.
During his downtime, the 6-foot-4 dynamo was a fitness fanatic who loved tennis, CrossFit, working out and running races, including the Bay to Breakers. In 2012, he was celebrating the May 20 race in typical San Francisco fashion, wearing a bright-green wig as he gathered with friends dressed as troll dolls at Golden Gate Park. They were hanging out with a group of strangers when someone abruptly ended the Santa Clara man's promising future with a single punch. The blow from one of the strangers knocked Martin to the pavement, and he never regained consciousness. On a tragic Friday that soon followed, after being removed from life support, this perpetual motion machine of a human being died at San Francisco General Hospital.
In the midst of a construction slowdown Erik Sundquist began working with Stephen to help grow the fledgling company. Erik’s extensive background in construction coupled with knowledge of labor & materials costs, poised Stephen Martin & Associates (SMA California) to expand it’s reach in the reserve study arena. After the tragic events of 2012 Erik vowed to continue to honor Stephen’s legacy by taking control of the company now known simply as SMA Reserves. It was Stephen’s original vision of utilizing cutting edge technology to provide affordable, easy to read and understand reserve studies. This vision forms the foundation of the company’s motto “expertly prepared-simply presented”.
As we continue growing into Stephen’s original vision of what SMA could become, we have always sought to stay true to his ideas and the basic tenets of what he believed