Ella Neyland
While growing up in rental housing in Baltimore and Frederick, Maryland, Steadfast Apartment REIT president and chief financial officer Ella Neyland recalls that she could always tell whether her single mother had a good or bad landlord by the stress on her face when she came home from work. “That was really what got me into the apartment industry, understanding how it affects your life, where you live, and how people take care of you,” she says. “In particular, when I came to Steadfast, the culture was such that we really never lost sight of the fact that these apartments are these people’s homes.”
Ella Neyland, president and chief financial officer, Steadfast Apartment REIT
Neyland has worked with apartments for her entire career, starting at an investment bank and moving on to hold positions at commercial banks, publicly traded REITs, and apartment developers, including executive roles at UDR, Lincoln Property Co., and CIBC. She joined Steadfast in fall 2012, served as president for all three Steadfast-sponsored REITs, and was named president and CFO when STAR was internalized on Sept. 1, 2020.
In an executive meeting just before the start of the pandemic, Neyland recalls emphasizing to her colleagues that “your apartment home is like your sanctuary.”
With this statement now more true than ever, Neyland has trained her focus on the well-being of the people in her organization—both the comfort of the residents and the camaraderie and morale of her employees working from home.
Over the course of the past year, Neyland says she has done more one-on-one conversations than she has in her entire career—15 to 30 minutes with up to 45 people a week. She encouraged employees to stick with a routine, and make time to care for themselves and for family. During this time, work never once suffered. “We have a set of core values, and one of our values is people,” Neyland says. “You have to have that camaraderie and team effort,
people caring about each other, to get through the tough times.”
This, more than anything, has convinced Neyland of the importance of a strong company culture—especially in times to come. “I believe that the ability for people to have a great community that’s well maintained and well located, a great community for them to call home, and the ability to have a rent check that lines up with your paycheck are going to be increasingly more important.”
