FAB FOUR Throw four executives, all of whom have run multifamily businesses before, in a room together, and you’re likely to witness a few clashes of the titans.
Unless you’re at Berkshire, that is, where CEO Apeseche, chief investment officer David Olney, CFO David Quade, and COO Tom Shuler have coalesced into an unexpectedly collaborative team, despite their individual C-level resumes. Shuler, for example, who handles Berkshire’s property management division, previously oversaw a 200,000-unit portfolio at former multifamily powerhouse Insignia Financial Group.
“A lot of it has to do with the fact that each one was successful in their and the others recognize that,” believes Donovan, who served as CEO of Berkshire Mortgage prior to its acquisition by Deutsche Bank. “They show a lot of respect for each other.”
Under the watchful eyes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, whose portraits hang in a large Berkshire conference room, Berkshire’s four top leaders share the corporate vision and their respective roles in executing that strategy. They don’t interrupt each other, they give each other credit, and they return repeatedly to the importance of collaboration in the Berkshire model.
“We all take ownership of each piece of the value chain, allocating resources and support so everyone gets the support they need,” says Shuler.
His statement is soon corroborated by Olney. “It’s cross-collaborative,” the chief investment officer says. “Having run property management in the Berkshire/Blackstone/[Goldman Sachs] partnership for five years, I have great empathy for the property management team, so I can direct acquisitions to opportunities that best fit our property management skill set.”
Such an attitude and practice represents quite a departure for most multifamily companies, where acquisitions typically does the deal and then turns it over to management to make the operations numbers work, no matter how unrealistic those financial expectations might be.
But Berkshire executives at all levels say their strategy of getting acquisitions, renovations, and operations to work in partnership with each other on everything from due diligence to building an asset’s value is the heart of their business strategy.
At other multifamily companies, “you rarely have a senior person out at the property before initial bidding,” says Stephen Zaleski, Berkshire’s senior vice president of acquisitions. “We’re developing a vision for a property together.”
Obviously the culture of collaboration reaches beyond Apeseche, Shuler, Olney, and Quade: Zaleski’s comment is made during an afternoon of touring suburban Maryland properties in a Lincoln Navigator with division vice president Dean Holmes, regional manager Cathy Robinson, and vice president of redevelopment Zach Maggart. When you work at Berkshire, you always travel with a team.