The Lease-Up Multi-Housing News

As the regional manager of The Habitat Co.’s market-rate and condominium portfolio in Michigan, Steven St. Louis has maneuvered crises big and small. When unexpected situations arise, he prioritizes trust, transparency and timely communication with his residents.



According to St. Louis, this is crucial to maintaining
credibility, whether you’re addressing a dispute between two neighbors or something more jarring that impacts multiple residents. 



How can managers ensure that they are effectively managing a crisis? By monitoring their response in real time—during and after the crisis—and adjusting where needed.

 

Here are some of the topics we cover:


Why it’s important to balance empathy and understanding while guiding residents through a crisis (6:20)
How timely communication helps property managers stay ahead of the curve (8:53)
Navigating social media’s public square and controlling the narrative (11:35)
His best advice for property managers to address any crisis (13:50)
How he handled a major, unexpected incident that had
immediate and long-term community impact (15:52)
Key priorities for mitigating potential damage to reputation (20:03)
Why providing emotional support to residents is as crucial as managing high-level operations (26:57)

Jennifer Rowe was studying finance and economics in Boston when she took a summer internship with a real estate firm. She liked the industry so much that she decided to deviate from her initial plans to pursue a career in investment banking. Today, she is the vice president of portfolio management at StreetLights Residential, a company that has been in Dallas for more than a decade and has since developed over 14,000 multifamily units in 11 cities across six states.

In this episode of Mission Success: Women in Multifamily, Rowe talks to Multi-Housing News Senior Editor Laura Calugar about her career and lease-up strategies that work, but also shares details about her personal life.

Crafting a resident-first multifamily management company is a feat of its own. But marketing and getting the word out about it is another. Take it from Nicole Jones, senior vice president of marketing and communications, Veris Residential, who created and launched an entire program that takes residential care to a whole new level.



In her second appearance with Top Marketers, Jones dives into the company’s newest program, Veris Promise. Multi-Housing News Associate Editor Jordana Rothberg and Jones discuss what the program means and how it came to be in the first place. Spoiler alert: from getting everyone to buy into the program to working out its legal kinks, it was no easy task.



If you haven’t had the chance to listen to the previous
conversation between Jones and Rothberg, it’s highly recommended to go back hear about the Veris Residential brand and its pillars of ESG, philanthropy and DEI. For this podcast, listen in as the two delve into:



·        What Veris Promise actually is (1:30)

·        Where a new program like Veris Residential lives (5:35)

·        The buy-in process and making alterations along the way (8:15)

·        Learning to love feedback (14:45)

·        The initiatives that make up the Veris Promise and Jones’s personal favorite (17:00)

·        How Veris Promise has been received internally (23:00)

·        Resident reactions to the new program (24:40)

The cost of insurance for multifamily communities isn’t
going down. Instead, owners and operators are having to find ways to adapt. But it doesn’t have to be entirely on the plates of multifamily to solve problems brought about by increasing insurance prices. Policy solutions have the potential to offer some help too.



In this episode of Quarterly with NMHC, Multi-Housing News Associate Editor Jordana Rothberg is joined by the National Multifamily Housing Council’s Kevin Donnelly, vice president of government affairs, technology and strategic initiatives, and Caitlin Sugrue Walter, vice president of research.



Together the three discuss how insurance costs are impacting affordable housing, how these prices might change in the future and what policymakers can do to ease high insurance cost impacts. Follow along as this podcast goes over:



·       The current multifamily insurance landscape (1:30)

·       What factors are lending towards high insurance prices (4:30)

·       Where high interest rates do and don’t play a role (8:00)

·       The impact of high insurance costs on the national housing shortage (12:00)

·       How high insurance costs directly affect affordable housing (14:45)

·       Strategies firms are implementing to navigate a high insurance landscape (19:30)

·       The importance of high-quality data and modern technology (24:00)

·      Policy solutions that could help (27:00)

·      How experts foresee the future of multifamily insurance costs (33:00)

Despite ongoing volatility and uncertainty in the economic sector, the student housing market has performed better than other assets, maintaining an uptick both in preleasing and units under construction.  Major players in the field, such as Core Spaces, managed to pencil student housing deals and even kick off projects nearing 2,000 beds.



With a portfolio of 70 properties, serving over 40 institutions and almost 3,000 units under development, the company has been at the forefront of a localized market, as Brendan Miller, Chief Investment Officer of Student Housing believes.



In our third episode of Student Housing Unlocked with Multi-Housing News’ Associate Editor Olivia Bunescu is joined by Miller to discuss the challenges in the sector when it comes to developing and delivering new communities, what students want nowadays, as well as Core Spaces’ business approach and values.



Here are the main ideas discussed in this episode:


Tailoring projects to fit the needs of today’s students (01:13)
Student housing is a very localized business, particularly for developments (2:50)
The construction timeline is one of the major challenges in the sector (3:50)
Effective strategies for tackling rising construction costs (6:13)
Choosing the right partners for student housing projects (9:04)
“You can be a quarter mile from campus, but you could be a quarter mile from the wrong side of campus.” (10:32)
Core Spaces’ portfolio performance (13:00)
Factors that make projects stand out (14:33)
How can you successfully enter a new market?
(17:09)
The calculus on how to pick a market (18:45)
Advantages of being vertically integrated
(21:11)
How to become a “people company” (22:33)
Keeping the focus on Top Tier markets and being
an active buyer (24:35)
Trends that will further shape the student housing sector (26:20)

Though her official title is Director of Development,
Marquette Cos.' Ann Reckelhoff plays a huge role in all aspects of projects, including branding and design, construction management, hiring and operations, management and lease-up.

In this episode of Mission Success: Women in Multifamily, Reckelhoff reveals to Multi-Housing News Senior Editor Laura Calugar what it takes to be successful in today’s complicated economic context. With extensive experience in both development and operations, Reckelhoff admits that the people that she surrounds herself with are a key ingredient of her accomplishments.