Greg Mutz, CEO of AMLI Residential, a Chicago-based apartment owner with approximately 22,000 units, is refocusing many of his asset management team members on other tasks. For instance, AMLI invested in getting 16 of its employees LEED-certified and educated about environmental savings. “We are making a real commitment to green,” Mutz says. “We don’t have a lot of talent in this area, and, so far, we haven’t generated a buck.”
But Mutz hopes this investment will eventually help AMLI reduce energy costs at its own properties, while possibly offering consulting services to others in the industry.
Getting the Right Fit
But how do you know who to keep and who to lose? It’s easy to justify holding onto the top-level superstars, those folks whose institutional knowledge, work ethic, and contributions to the bottom line are well-documented. But when it comes to mid- or entry-level employees, it’s important to remember that some people transition better than others. The key is to recognize certain qualities—flexibility, eagerness, versatility, commitment, intelligence—in those individuals that make them suitable to a role shift.
For instance, when Kettler, a McLean, Va.-based owner and manager with 13,000 units, needed to trim its construction services department, it moved two people—Nicole Jones and Chris Churmusi—from the development marketing department to the corporate marketing team. Churmusi is a market research specialist, while Jones is a senior sales and marketing manager. They say the only difference in their new roles is the audience—they’re now marketing to renters instead of owners.
“Even though management and development have their own marketing department with their own responsibilities and focuses, we’re structured to work jointly as well,” Churmusi says. “The move was easy because I knew the dynamics of the company and the people.”
For development employees, the maintenance team is an easy fit. “Generally, development guys understand how to prepare a building for service,” Adelman says. “So we moved several guys into some of those [maintenance] capacities to help organize how we perform our operations and customer service and all of that stuff.”
In fact, Adelman thought the move would make his developers more cognizant of some of the practical aspects of making a building easier to operate, such as where they’re putting the trash centers, maintenance shops, even access to HVAC rooms. “They understand the process of zoning and entitlements, and they’re learning how to build a building,” he says. “They don’t know how to operate a building, though. The most successful developers are the ones who have operated buildings before. They think with operations in mind as they’re going through the construction and design process.”
Moving someone from one marketing department to another within the same company—or from a development team to the maintenance side—can be seamless. More complex moves, where developers put on property management hats, can be more perilous. In those cases, it often comes down to experience.
