Getting Ahead of Multifamily’s Property Management Challenges
Overall at a strategic level the big challenge has been staffing. Now it’s vacancies.
Predicting which way the market winds will blow by mid-October, when the GlobeSt. Multifamily Fall 2023 conference will take place in Los Angeles, is not easy in the current environment, but Kyle Crown expects that the situation will not be substantially different by then.
That means the challenges brought on by low occupancy/high vacancy rates in multifamily will feature heavily in the discussions.
“We’ve been in such an environment for the last decade-plus where rates just keep going up and up that in LA especially that’s just been a given and all of a sudden we’re seeing that slow or even stopping in certain segments of the market, and so there’s a little bit of a vacancy-occupancy concern,” says Crown, who is president of Los Angeles Property Management Group.
The group mostly manages residential multifamily properties but also has some commercial, office and industrial properties on the roster.
As part of the Property Management Bootcamp taking place in the afternoon of October 16, Crown will be speaking on Overcoming Operational Challenges, alongside Rochelle Mills, president and CEO of Innovative Housing Opportunities.
Property management — which Crown describes as “problem solving for 400 different clients, essentially” — is rarely short of operational challenges. “Part of the fun of it is it is a new challenge or something different every day,” he says.
However, the nature of the difficulties changes depending on the macro situation that drives the market.
“Overall at a strategic level, for years the big challenge was staffing. There’s always turnover at certain positions, holes that need to be plugged… Two years ago I would have said collections and making sure that people pay their rent during the pandemic [was the main challenge]. But now it seems like it’s vacancies,” he says. “We’ve never been at this level of vacancy in the decade I’ve been doing this and I think it’s going to continue at least through the end of the summer.”
His advice as to how to cope with whatever challenges arise is to not always be reactive — a tendency of property managers. “You have to get out ahead of the situation sometimes,” he says.
GlobeSt.com is holding its multifamily fall conference on October 16-17 in Los Angeles. For more information visit here.