“Acquisition guys can gloss over a lot of details,” Heimler says. “Property management really is a detailed job. Acquisition guys focus on the numbers in their pro forma, but sometimes they don’t want to sit down to do the work. They like buying and then handing it off.”
Ultimately, this kind of attrition can be painful, especially in the development arena. “If you’re a development guy, I don’t know what you do,” Woodward says. “There will be virtually no development for a few years. Do they leave the industry?”
If that happens, the industry will lose a great deal of institutional knowledge. And that could put it in a major bind when it is time to build again. “The best and brightest minds that have been well-trained in the arena are going to go elsewhere,” Stuart says. “A lot of those guys will never come back. We’re losing a lot of knowledge in our industry, and we will lose a lot more. It will be a while before the economics of new development make sense again.”
And, until it does, guys like Langston will still be taking calls in the middle of the night.
