Q: How did you grow an aptitude for military housing?
A: My background is in negotiating telecom, cable, and hi-speed Internet contracts as well as setting up utilities, sub-metering, and renters insurance. So lots of technologies, lots of systems, and I think that’s what set me up in military: a background in finding solutions to create efficiencies. In military, you are talking 2,000-home properties to operate and manage, so I’ve been using a lot of the things that I had always been reading about and researching. It might have been slower to implement those systems across our conventional portfolios, but we had a brand new slate in military housing.
Q: What are the major multifamily trends that you also see in military?
A: Building green and putting sustainable practices into place. A challenge we have in military housing is the transition to privatized utilities. There’s never been any reason for service members to manage their energy consumption as it has always been paid for by the military. So we have launched a program where they get mock bills for a year to prepare them. It’s our responsibility to educate the residents as much as we can about conservation and sustainable living. Helping them manage their utilities budget is a great beginning.
Q: What’s next in the military housing arena?
A: We are keeping an eye on the privatization of unaccompanied housing (i.e., military hotels), as well as some barracks projects for the Navy, but what we really need to start looking at is housing for our aging veteran population. flat is an idea that I am trying to take to the forefront with military housing in places where we might have some excess homes.
Q: What is the best career advice you’ve received?
A: I keep this one poster on my desk—it’s an ad for Forest City, and I don’t remember where I got it, but it says ‘To make it happen you need one thing: everything.’ That’s building, developing, leasing, managing, partnering. We have that all in one place, which is different from many companies. It makes the big projects easier, and everything in military is a big project.
Q: What movie did you recently see that knocked your socks off?
A:Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr. was really cool.
[FAVE FOUR]
Bauer’s must-have military amenities:
24-hour call centers: “We have to [be] 24/7; whether to do lease-ups or initiate service requests, we have to have 24/7 response.”
Web-based facilities management: “This manages requests and links with handheld Nextel devices.”
Advanced video solutions: “It may take a while to implement, [but] advanced video solutions such as IPTV will be crucial.
- Web 2.0 “Our Web sites have to be true portals communicating events, opportunities, and service issues.”
