As cooler weather begins, staffing and resident communication may require seasonal changes. It’s also a good time to review budgets with an eye toward next year.
As multifamily companies get prepared for fall on the maintenance side by stocking up on supplies, equipment and possibly staff to
deal with the seasonal elements, they’re simultaneously focused on the operations side preparing for seasonal staffing changes and communication with residents, all while looking ahead to next year’s budget.
Staffing Changes
For Sky Properties, a 28-year-old company with 45 buildings and about 2,000 units scattered throughout Southern California, September is a time for getting back to normal with staffing after employees have all taken their summer vacations. After busy spring and summer leasing seasons in the company’s mostly 20- to 50-unit buildings, that tends to slow down, and CEO Kari Negri says she starts thinking about her staff’s career wants and needs going forward.
“Maybe you want to change someone who’s been doing leasing at a property to being an onsite manager somewhere,” she says. “You have to think about, as you’ve worked with people on staff, what are their strengths, and what are their weaknesses?… That means [engaging in] communication with your employees, to see what they want. I’ll go to sleep and wake up and think, ‘If I move this person there and that person there, that will work best for our company.’ But you have to actually communicate rather than guess what they want.”
If an employee has shown a gift for writing, a good eye for grammar and a talent for taking photos and making sure advertising looks sharp, Negri might redeploy that person on the communications side. If someone enjoys going out and meeting residents, it might make sense for them to focus on filling vacancies rather than being an office assistant behind the scenes.
Scott Properties Group, a third-party property management firm based in Santa Monica, Calif., doesn’t hire many part-time staff during the summer because it’s not cost-effective to teach skill sets over and over to people who then cycle off, says CEO Scott Brody. But the company does bring in interns—not necessarily just during the summer season—who tend to handle email campaigns and other communications needs.
“We’ll mentor college kids. They get credit within their specific school, and it’s a paid internship,” he says. “If they like the industry, when they’re ready to get out into the industry, they come back to us for a job.… We try to get sophomores and juniors, so we can have those interns for a few years, teach them a skill set and try to make them an offer before they graduate.”
Trio Properties LLC, based in Glastonbury, Conn., also doesn’t need to do much seasonal hiring for the fall among the properties it manages in Connecticut and New York, which total about 2,500 units, says Kelly DeMatteo, Vice President of Property Management. “A lot of the summer help you would see in communities doesn’t get refilled in the fall,” she says. “Leasing in New England is on a bell curve—it tapers off in the fall. Typically, you’re not seeing those properties filled until the following year. Lifeguards for the pool, or summer maintenance positions, we’re letting those positions taper off.”
Communication with Residents
As fall progresses, staffing arrangements need to be made ahead of busy holiday periods, and residents need to be reminded via communications that on certain days, notably Thanksgiving and Christmas, maintenance people will not be available to attend to their needs, Negri says. “We get those calls every year, no matter how many times we remind them to turn on their ovens to see if they work, they do not do it until Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, and then it is just too late to expect someone to fix it.”
Trio Properties uses a combination of text messaging, e-newsletters and a community portal to communicate with residents about everything from when the pool is going to close to landscaping and fall cleanups that are going to take place to reminding residents that
fall can be a dry time of year, so be careful where you toss cigarette butts, for example, DeMatteo says.
But there’s probably more communication among people on the management side than with residents, she says. “In the fall, there’s not a lot that [residents] have to do. Sometimes there’s more communication in the winter—what temperature to leave your heat at, if you’re going away.”
Berger Communities, based in Wayne, Pa., doesn’t tend to see many specific changes related to staffing or communication headed into the fall, says Anne-Marie Niklaus, President of the firm, which owns 56 properties totaling about 10,000 units in the mid-Atlantic region. “We try to over-communicate with residents and be very customer-centric all year long,” she says.
Annual Budgeting
On the budgeting side, the start of fall is the beginning of the end of the calendar year, and Negri and her staff spend time taking stock of whether the current year’s budget is adding up—and what to plan for in the coming year.
“What have you used up in your budget, and what have you not used up?” she says. “I have to come within 10 percent, that’s my goal. Going into the new year, are all the prices you were quoted mid-year the prices you are going to be paying? Did you change a vendor? You want to make sure your budget is still good to go for January 1st.”
Multifamily companies should be looking at budget variances monthly throughout the year anyway, Negri says. “But as you get into fall, you want to make sure you are within the [annual] budget lines,” she says. “If you see a line item where you haven’t done anything, maybe look at what you missed and circle back. Or maybe you need that [allotment] somewhere else in your budget. But these are things you want to know before you get to the end of the year.”
Other operations-oriented concerns that Negri tends to in the fall are ensuring the vendor and resident insurance policies are up-to-date, and that she’s scheduled a semiannual inspection (which usually happens in April and October), scheduled annual roof maintenance and sent out bids for tree trimming, which happens in November. “And making sure those bids match what I said would be in the budget the year before,” she says.
Properties that Scott Properties Group manages have different challenges each year regarding budgeting, Brody says. After last year’s torrential rains throughout the winter and the damage they left behind, his company is preparing its owners to spend money on roof and other maintenance to prepare for a potential next set of storms.
“Which would be making sure all the leaks you had last winter, you’re setting yourself up now to start budgeting to get your roof back in shape, [to] get your windows sealed again,” he says. “There’s going to be fairly large expenses in California for building owners who had massive amounts of leaks. And it’s everybody I talk to in California—it wasn’t just roofs, it was gutters, stucco, windows—[had] so many problems with different waterproofing systems because of the massive rains we had. Smaller building owners didn’t have the budget to do a full re-roof. We’ve tried to implement, in smaller buildings, reserves to tackle that now.”
Fall also means budgeting season for Trio Properties, which DeMatteo and her staff attempt to complete for the succeeding year by mid-November, or Dec. 1 at the latest. “What do the KPIs look like for 2024? The KPIs will assist us in creating the roadmap.” she says. “We’re focused on expense projections for 2024. We work closely with supplier partners to obtain the best pricing for the upcoming year.”
Berger Communities planned to move forward with its budgeting and overall strategic planning for 2024 as the fall got underway, Niklaus says. “What are our metrics going to look like? All of that is what we’re ramping up for,” she says. “We’re making sure that we’re starting our asset walks, looking at [capital expenditures] for budgets, and make sure we’re putting into place the metrics we expect to see in the 2023 budget, and continue to adjust accordingly based on performance until the budgets are finalized. We’re working on our expenses—with our supplier partners and our utilities—and trying to come up with rock-solid numbers for our budget.”
As part that process, Berger undertakes short-term and also three- and 10-year projections, looking at overall company initiatives, including what technology the firm may want to change or implement, Niklaus says. High on that list could be artificial intelligence, and how that might be useful and otherwise play out in the multifamily context.
“Part of our strategic planning will be looking at what AI is going to look like for real estate and property management,” she says. “As I look at our fall, it really is our budget season, and doing strategic planning for the upcoming year, reviewing staffing plans and everything that encompasses operations, and taking the opportunity to make sure we are set up for success.”
Ed Finkel is a frequent contributor to units.