RangeWater: Bridging Gaps Through Communication And Interaction In The Multifamily Industry With Karen Key

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RangeWater: Bridging Gaps Through Communication And Interaction In The Multifamily Industry With Karen Key

My guest is Karen Key. Karen is Managing Director for RangeWater. She’s also the President of the Institute of Real Estate Management Atlanta Chapter. Welcome to the show, Karen.

Thanks. I am happy to be here.

Why don't you start by introducing yourself to the audience a little bit? Tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional and personal background.

I am the Managing Director of Property Management at RangeWater. I'm one of a few of us. I have had the opportunity to build out and take over our build-to-rent platform. I have been in multifamily since 2005. I have a little bit of an unconventional background coming out of school. I did apartments until then, and I'm getting to do the intentionally built single-family neighborhoods.

Prior to multifamily in 2005, I have a degree, and my background was in restaurant and resort management. I found a lot of similarities that made it a great transition going from that hospitality fast-paced restaurant background into the multifamily pace. It kept me going fast but gave me a little bit better hours, to say the least.





I've been at RangeWater for many years. Prior to that, I’ve been with a lot of other great companies out there. I was with Greystar for a long time and ZRS Management. All of those have helped shape my career along the way, but RangeWater has been a very unique experience and I can't imagine not being here. I finished my presidency of the Georgia chapter of IREM. It was a great year. I handed it over to Jonathan Tucker and I can't wait to stand behind him as an honorary past president and help him with his vision along the way.

I used to work with Jonathan at Cortland, and prior to that, at Greystar. It's a very small world. You mentioned RangeWater. You've been with them for many years. I wanted to start by asking you what's so special about RangeWater. For someone to dedicate many years and counting of their career, something's got to be right. They got to be doing something right out there. What are some things they're doing right at RangeWater?

There are so many things that I could point out at RangeWater, but it all boils down to the culture here. It has a completely different culture than anywhere I've ever worked or any company I've ever known across various industries. I'm not even pointing out just multifamily. If you think about it, RangeWater is still a baby compared to a lot of the companies out there. Our management division was founded in late 2010. When I came a couple of years ago, we only had 6,000 units under management.

Now, we have 93,000 units under management, so it's been a lot of growth. A lot of it is attributed to the type of environment that we have here. We are a collaborative company. We're forward-thinking. We want to look at things differently. We want to constantly try to find new ways to do stuff. We spend a lot of time studying companies outside of our industry. Those are companies that have a great culture and that focus on customer service. We’re figuring out what makes them tick and what makes their culture so amazing and emulating that back into RangeWater.



It was interesting. One of the meetings I had was a two-hour review of our last associate satisfaction survey. We are changing how we do them. We used to do them once a year, and it's going to be an ongoing thing. This was our benchmark. They have an engagement score. Seeing the engagement score of our company far exceeds the benchmark industry average by almost ten points was a true testament to who we are as a company.

Over the years, we've always focused on hearing from our associates and wanting to know what is the experience for them like on the front lines. We’re like, “What do our onsite teams think? What do our entry-level associates and our various departments feel and think when they come here?” We've made plans on how to improve that.

One of the things you always hear in almost every company is, “I want more communication. I need communication from the home office. I don't understand the vision of the company.” 1 of our top 5 things was everybody understands the vision of the company. You're talking about surveying 1,600 people and that comes back as a top five response with a 91% satisfaction.

They have faith in their executive leadership and understand the vision of the company and how they impact it. To me, that speaks volumes to what we've done to help get that message out. Our executive teams are accessible. They're not up in an ivory tower and pushing messages down through other people. The type of culture that is created for us is immeasurable.

You mentioned feedback. First of all, employee feedback. I'd like to ask you about a feedback topic. How does your company process feedback from employees? There are certain things that employees are voicing out through their surveys. What's the action? How do you process, and what do you do with the feedback? What does RangeWater do with the feedback once it’s received?

That's something that probably makes us different. Since we’re a privately owned company and the way we're structured, we're able to adapt to that feedback quickly compared to some other ways other companies are structured out there. For employee feedback, you're going to get it. What we typically do is whomever it goes to brings it up to the higher group, and then we're like, “Is this a one-off? Is anybody else here in this? Is it systemic?” At times, we may send out a supplemental survey company-wide asking for feedback on a certain topic to see if it's more global.

One thing that came up is we had it brought to our executive team that certain associates didn't feel we had a great policy surrounding paternity and maternity leaves. We didn't, and like most companies out there, there’s not a specific policy for it. You use your PTO and extra time off and that's what it is. For Steven Shores, our CEO, that resonated for him. He didn't want our associates to feel like they were having to burn all their PTO to have a child or that they weren't being considered properly.

We allowed three months. You could take twelve weeks off. You could take time off. That wasn't a burden, but they were having to take a lot of that without pay unless they had a short-term disability and things of that nature. Steven put together a focus group of associates at all levels in the company, both home office and on-site. He had them come together and said, “What would you want to see different in this policy? What would you want to get from a paternity and a maternity leave?”

Some things may be achievable and some things not, but they came together and reached a resolution that was quickly approved by our executive team. It got rolled out company-wide as, “Effective this day, from here going forward, if you have a child or adopt a child, here are the benefits that you can get. Here's the time off you can take without having to use your PTO. Here's what you have when you come back.” They included adoption in the policy. It's not just the birth of a child.

I'm surrounding the same topic, but a couple of years ago, we had several people at the home office that had children. We started finding spaces within our office that we could dedicate to lactation rooms. They would have somewhere where they felt that they could go and continue to care for their children and do what they needed to do, but also be back in the office.

I don't know why those two came to mind first, but that shows that we'll investigate it and see if it's valid. If it needs changing, we typically put together a focus group because we're not necessarily the right people to come up with what's the best way to do it. We then present it to the executive team and roll it out where we can.

I love this for so many reasons. You and I have worked at the site level. We both know very well that the site level is where the action happens. We're not experts at a corporate office. We're not there every day in and day out. Our expertise has been on the site. When you are not on-site on a daily basis, things happen at such a rapid pace and change at a rapid pace.

For us to completely ignore or think that we know better than the front-line associates is probably not the best way to run a company. It's a very strong statement for your company culture and the number of people that you have with very long tenures with the company starting with you, other executives that I know personally in your company, and all the way down to site level. People love working for RangeWater, so you must be doing something right.

I hope so. I feel like we do things right. I can't tell you the number of times that we formed that task force that I mentioned. They're instrumental in making sure we're staying in front of what our associates need or even what our residents need. We form a task force all the time with the home office and people from various departments and onsite team members. If we're getting feedback from residents, whether that's amenities, design of their interior units, or whatever it may be, those task forces are instrumental in our success.

You mentioned your division, which is Build-To-Rent. This is a fairly new thing in the United States. The term has been coined in Europe. They don't use multifamily. They don't use property management. The first time I heard about BTR was years ago, and it was somewhere in England. Someone from England used the term. They had associations and things of that nature, but nothing at a scale that we're doing it right here in the United States. The term was adopted from Europe. Am I right or wrong about this?

You're somewhat right. We, at least RangeWater, try not to use that terminology because we knew outside of the US, Build-To-Rent represents what we know as multifamily. It apartments. It's anything that is built with the intention to be rented. We initially tried to not call it Build-To-Rent because of that. We didn't want it to get confused or diluted. It was like, “What do we call it?” There were so many different acronyms out there. There's BTR, there's BFR, SFR, and B2R. There were 1 million of them out there.

We started with SFR, but then quickly learned that didn't make sense. Most people, when they hear SFR, think of scattered sites. The more it started to catch on and the more there started to be conferences behind this space and it started to become more widespread across the US, BTR and BFR seem to be the two acronyms that caught on the most. We landed on BTR.

The industry, as a whole, is still up in the air in terms of what exactly it's going to call. Ours may change again. It's a unique phenomenon that's new to us in the US. It's been out in the West for a few years, but a little bit different than what we're seeing in the phenomenon. Out in the West, you've had builders doing this for a while.

Before this BTR space, it is in our mind anything that doesn't go vertical. If it's not stacked living, we roll it into our Build-To-Rent portfolio. It can be villas, cottages, duplexes, townhomes, or fully detached homes. The caveat is a fully-rented neighborhood. It's not a scattered site here and there. It's every home within this neighborhood is for rent.

When this first came to me and Tracy Bowers came to me and asked if I wanted to start building out this platform at RangeWater, I jumped at the chance. Honestly, I was like, “How have we never done this before?” There is an entire subset of the rental population that this speaks to. We've never tapped into this. We've never gone there. It baffled me that it took us this long to even think about it. It's like, “This was under our noses all the time.” It's taken off like crazy.

The West has been there for a while. A lot of those were more of a horizontal multifamily place, so they were fully amenitized. They were running them and staffing them as a multifamily community would be. We're seeing them shift to this more neighborhood feel. There are not so many amenities and not so many services, but providing these residents what they need and what they're looking for.

Talking about how we approached things differently, when Steven Shores decided this was a space he wanted to be active in, he was watching it in 2019 and 2020 when everybody was working from home and trying to figure out how we keep everybody busy. He put together a task force. He was like, “Let's investigate what this space looks like, where we can exist in it, and how we can do it differently.” He very quickly understood. He was like, “I want to be a player in this space and be on the front end of it.”

We had one community, and it was a horizontal multifamily community. Steven dedicated me to that space. He was like, “I want you rewriting policies and procedures. I want you to investigate this.” Before we even had communities and anything in the space, he was putting resources behind it. It took a while to get these communities up. You think about that being August of 2020. We're in December of 2022 and we have 75 open communities. That’s almost 9,000 homes. We have an awarded pipeline right at 18,000 homes. It's been a fast growth for us in this space. I attribute that to Steven and the Rangewater executive team having the foresight to dedicate the resources to it before it got ahead of them.

It's truly amazing. Especially with what we're seeing in a market with interest rates, the opportunity for people to have access to credit and mortgages to purchase homes shrunk. The alternative is to go rent an apartment or a home. For those that want to buy a home, probably their second choice will be renting a home versus renting an apartment. I would think most of them or probably some of them will opt for an apartment.

It only makes sense that this type of product exists out there. I happen to work for a company that does service for single-family homes for institutional owners. It's something that's becoming huge. I would love to watch RangeWater and your growth and maybe get you back here to talk about build-to-rent or single-family homes for home rentals. In the future, this is going to be huge. It will be as big as the apartments are. Do you disagree?

I agree 100%.

A lot of the viewers are looking at someone like you with an outstanding career in business, property management, and multifamily. Some of them want to know, “What does it take to become an executive?” The next I would like to ask you is to share a few things with the audience. What do you think are some things or some traits that help you get into an executive position and a position that you are in?

There are a lot of traits we could talk about. I'm thinking there are 3, but we'll start with 2. With communication, the more you want to move up and the more you move up, the more you're going to have to come at you at one time. You have to understand how to effectively communicate and how to communicate to a variety of audiences. It’s not just, “I know how to type a great email. I know how to talk to someone.”

As you move up, you're talking to so many different audiences. You want to be able to talk to clients. You want to be able to talk to owners. You want to be able to talk to presidents of companies. You also have to be able to talk, communicate, and relate to regional onsite teams all the way down to groundskeepers.

When you think about the variety of people that you're interacting with on a daily basis, one method of communication isn't going to speak to all of them. You've got to learn how to be a chameleon and speak to your audience in a way that's going to resonate with them. Speak clearly and concisely. You do not talk too much and do not talk too little. You provide them with the information they need that’s going to make it relevant in their eyes.

On the organization side, it’s having a system in place to keep you on track, keep you on task, know what's due when, and where you have to be when. The higher you get, the crazier that calendar gets and the crazier the demands you get. Those are probably the two biggest fundamentals. Past that, to get to that point and to get you where you want to go, it is networking. For those of you out there who may know Dr. Debbie, it's net-weaving. It's constantly expanding that mental Rolodex you have. It's making connections in the industry and having those connections that are going to help you get where you want to be, not the ones that are going to hold you back or keep you where you are.

It's putting yourself out there and getting involved in organizations like IREM and the apartment associations. It’s any place that’s going to get you that visibility and help you get that recognition. I'm sure everybody has heard, "You don't dress for the job you have. You dress for the job you want," and that comes in every aspect. You have to start acting and emulating where you want to go to get there. Get involved. Get to know people. Keep that network growing. On a personal side, fine-tune those communication skills and those organizational skills.



Communication is a big deal. I agree with you. You have to be able to communicate at every level from the bottom to the top. That is great advice. Thank you for that. The next topic that I have that I want to discuss with you is labor shortages. This is something that the whole economy has been hit with and has been struggling with a challenge.

Our industry, multifamily in general, has been hurting more than any industry, generally speaking. I can only think of maybe hospitality being hit worse than we were. Other than that, we're right there. We're right behind hospitality and being challenged to find talent to fill the vacant positions. I wanted to get your take on anything that we have gotten to this point we got here, and then also to share some solutions or some great things that you learn to be working for you and your company to attract and also retain rates.

I often wonder how we got here, too. You look at the hospitality industry. They have been hit the hardest, but there are a lot of similarities. I have this twenty-something in my house. It’s him not so much as some of his friends. I watch them. They immediately want these overly flexible jobs, great hours, and no weekends. Whether we realize it or not, and it's happened more over the last few years, we are part of the hospitality industry. We are there to serve others.

Our hours aren't 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM always. It's not Monday through Friday. A lot of those customer service-driven positions have been the ones that have been hit so hard in this labor shortage. Years before that, I feel like we started making huge strides. We started getting college degrees that were driven to property management. People could go to college and come out with a real estate degree and get into property management.

I have faith that it's still going to happen and it's going to bounce back. It's finding the people who understand flexibility. They understand that because you have to sign up and start at this point, there is such a career that can be started from working in property management and starting at that marketing rep, leasing consultant, and groundskeeper tech positions. It's not just a job. It's a career.

To talk about what we're doing to overcome it, there are a couple of things, but that is a big one for us. We’re pushing the career path. We're pushing, “You start here, but here's where you can go.” It’s not just the onsite path. There are so many facets to property management that people don't think about. You're getting exposure to marketing departments, training departments, asset management, construction, and maintenance services.

There are so many different career paths that come up from starting at the onsite level. That's the message we have to keep getting out there. We've always done college career fairs. We've promoted our internship program over the last couple of years. Alison Turner, the Senior Director of our Hiring and Recruiting Team, is phenomenal at doing that.

In 2022, we've been in higher focus on going to technical schools. We’re going to the high schools and getting in front of these kids before they even go to college. We’re like, “Maybe college isn't where you're headed, but let me show you a great career path and career option that we can get you involved in.”

We've done a lot of work with our HR attorneys to get approval to be able to start hiring people under the age of eighteen on a part-time basis. There are a lot of regulations that come if you hire under eighteen and somebody that's in high school with the maximum number of hours they can work a week, how they can work, and what type of job they can do. If we can be that part-time job for a junior or senior in high school and get them started on this career path, imagine where we would've been if we could have started that young and seen the doors that were being opened for us.

There is one thing we're striving to do. We were talking about it in the meeting that we had. If people are opting to work instead of going to college or they’re working while they’re in college, what education outside of Leasing 101 or how to be a RangeWater employee can we offer our associates so that we are continuing to better them and help them through their career path and lives? We’re focusing on the associate as a whole. That's one thing that's helped us with our retention.

Our associates know that they're respected. They know that they are our frontline and that we couldn't do this without them. We pour into them to make sure that they know they are heard and loved. We want to give them what they want. Keeping that talent is crucial, but it's getting creative and resourcing it wherever we can get it. Partnering with great programs like Core is another one that's been great for us. That has helped us get some talent that maybe would've never gotten put in front of our hiring team otherwise

I can say with certainty that your company does a way better job than the average management company out there because I'm seeing initiatives. Some of the ones that you shared are all over the place. Going to a high school, to me, is brilliant. It’s not only that, but you are telling the young kids out there that there's more than going to college or not. They’re like, “I'm either going to college or, pretty much, I'm not going to do much for myself.”

You also cut in line, too, because there's no competition if you get me to start working for you from high school and work part-time. They love it. They find, “This could be for me.” You already talk about a career path. You define career paths where those are a big deal. Everybody wants to know, “I'm here now. I could be here in 5 or 10 years, and this is how I get there.” You have a lot going on for you, so that's exciting to hear. Thank you for sharing with the audience because it's amazing. It’s what we should be embracing as an industry. Keep pushing for that and bring in a new log in.

I lived it on a personal level. It’s not through multifamily, but I have a son. He was graduating high school. He was one of the COVID graduates. He finished high school in the midst of the COVID pandemic and didn't go to school for a year and a half before he graduated. He applied to colleges. He got accepted to the colleges he wanted to go to. He got accepted to the colleges with all of his friends.

In his junior year of high school, he started working as a heavy diesel mechanics assistant and fell in love with it. By the time high school was ending, it was, “What are you going to do?” He was like, “I want to go to trade school. I want to pursue this heavy diesel route and then get my business degree.” I didn't force him in either direction, but I was like, “We need to lay this out,” because he was like, “I'm going to college. I'm going to trade school.”

He could tell me in college what fraternity he wanted to join. He didn't know what he wanted his degree to be. He didn't know anything, but he knew he loved what he was doing in this part-time job he had gotten to start in high school. He opted to work in a shop every day after he graduated, do his certification for Heavy Diesel at night, and knock it out in the first eighteen months. That's where we are. He finished his certification in December 2022. We'll see what he decides to do next, but meanwhile, he has a great job and he's had it the whole time. He chose a route that spoke to him that went against society's norm.

It's an amazing story. Thank you for sharing. Next, I wanted to talk about something that is very personal to me. I'm passionate about it. I grew up in the maintenance industry. I came up as a groundskeeper. I'm very passionate about maintenance individuals or professionals developing and being able to be at a management level, too. They can become managers, not be the person that carries tool parts and is able to fix things around. They’re able to manage maintenance.

I'm going to make the statement. You tell me if you agree or disagree. We, as an industry in general, are lacking management training for our service managers. We like to call them service managers. We like them to manage $60 million, $70 million, or $80 million assets, but we're not supporting them with the proper training to become managers or to learn how to be managers.

This would set people off for failure. It creates a lot of extra stress for someone coming and being the top-performing service technician or service manager. These are two almost completely different jobs. The overlap is very little between the two jobs. Do you agree with the statement that we're not doing enough as an industry to teach our service managers how to manage?

I 100% could not agree more.

Secondly, what should we do about it?

There need to be more training initiatives made available to them and that they're pushed to go into. We have a couple of courses that we teach within RangeWater, and they're not optional. Our service techs and service directors have to attend them because we want them to get that education. They walk away from it and love the fact that they were part of it. They love the fact that they got to come.

A lot of the time, the job that you guys do I'd crucial, and I say you guys because that was your background and where you came from. You guys determine resident satisfaction. The office can help it or break it, but maintenance is the front line. They are the ones that are in the resident’s home. They are the ones that when something breaks, the residents turn to and they want it fixed quickly.

To pull you guys offsite and have you spend 1, 2, or 3 days in a training class is hard. It's burdensome on whomever you left on site. It's burdensome to the team, and then it leaves you guys feeling guilty. You're like, “I can't be here. I've got this going on. I've got that going on.” That's where you have to push them to go. It's hard to get them to step away from that day-to-day obligation because they take so much pride in what they do. They don't want to let anyone down.

With some of the courses, we've tried to keep them concise. We try to keep them to where they're only 1 hour or maybe 2 hours versus pulling them offsite for a full day. We've done Build Your Bank of Business. That talks about the connections you make, how to manage a budget, and how to do all these different things.

We’ve done classes of asset value. We’re teaching them IRV, how to build value in their asset, and how their job as a service director is. We’re teaching them if you save this much on a contractor or spend this much less on a turn, it can reduce your supplies by this amount, and the impact it has on the value of the asset and the owner's asset and their return on their investment. We teach them to get them to truly understand what a vital part they play in community success.

When we give this information to them and put them in these classes, you can see the light bulbs go off. You can see how much they love having this information. They’re so grateful after and they always send thank yous. We have those. I still don't think it's enough as an industry. It's something we have to continue to push and have to continue to make a standard.

We do expect them to be managers. We expect them to understand a budget. We expect them to work to a budget. Often, we have situations where they're not even being brought into the budget process. If a manager is writing a budget without their service director's input, that budget's not going to be valid. They got to have input from their service director. They know the asset better than anyone else. They know the capital maintenance that's needed. They know anything else that's going on. If a service director is not included in that, you're starting off on the wrong foot.

At least you started somewhere. It's truly amazing. Most companies haven't even started yet. I hope that this continues as a trend and that you build on what you already started. You maybe create a program for service managers. Maybe you're the first company that has a certified service manager program internally. We don't see that at a national level. The National Apartment Association does not have anything like that. We only have something for certified apartment maintenance technicians. We have it for community managers, but then not for service managers. It has to be a parity right there. We have to do better.

I agree. That is one thing. IREM goes across all facets of real estate. It's not just multifamily. It has multifamily, industrial, commercial, and everything. There are a couple of designations within IREM. While I wish we had one that was more specialized to service, and that is something that's been brought up a lot to IREM HQ and hopefully is on their radar as well, you have your ARM and CPM.

That ARM designation is a designation that a lot of service team members and service directors can get. When they go through that course, they do get to learn a lot about the asset value and the asset management side of things. There is a way in IREM to get a little bit of that education for your teams. I do think as an industry, we have to make it more standard.

We have to make it more tailored to the specific job of a service manager. I completely agree with you. The ARM designation is a great alternative to get them into the program, get them certified, and get them to be exposed to the management side of teams to understand management.

We need something. It's lacking and needed 100%.

One of the things that happened during COVID was that due to the lack of personal contact between our employees, for the most part, prospects, and residents, the solution for the most part was to develop technology to bridge that gap. We've seen for the past few years, we've been inundated with technology. I'd like to ask you. I'm sure that you've been part of many features and your company uses a lot of technology and a lot of apps. What are you seeing for trends out there when it comes to technology in multifamily?

With technology, we always said it was here to stay, but it is in our faces. It has been more commonplace. I meet like this all day long every day. We used to have phone calls with our clients and teams, but I'm in virtual meetings all the time. It's brought our company closer together. It's brought us and our clients closer together because you get that face-to-face interaction even though you may not physically be in the same room or even in the same space with someone.

The ability to interact this way at an organizational level with our teams has helped build our culture and helped get our culture out to multiple markets and not be so, “It’s the Atlanta culture where the home office is this way.” We communicate like this with residents. We communicate like this with prospects. It helps us build that rapport.



From an on-site perspective, self-guided tours were already emerging. They were already becoming something that prospects liked when they had the option. Some communities had them, but it wasn't imperative. Self-guided tours and virtual tours are what our prospects expect and what they want. There are tons of studies out there that show that these self-guided tours have higher satisfaction ratings than guided tours.

We are figuring out how as a company to incorporate self-guided tours into your arsenal as your leasing company and not let it be, “We don't need leasing associates. We have self-guided tours.” We have not taken that approach. We're like, “How can we make self-guided tours fit within the RangeWater culture and keep our high customer service or high touch point interaction but allow them to tour on their own?” That is a big one that came into play with it. There are a few other features that started to come out during COVID, but those are the big ones to me.

Video calls are commonplace. Video meetings are commonplace. It’s helping streamline a lot of things. It builds that culture. It builds that connection. It saves productivity. If you're wanting to have a meeting, you don't have to always fly people in. You don't have to always make people drive from South of Atlanta to North of Atlanta. You can have a one-hour meeting. People can all be in the same space, all be on camera, interact, and have fun.

We have a philosophy at RangeWater that the camera is on. It doesn’t matter if the person you're talking to doesn't turn their camera on. It's cameras on. You're always camera on. You're always camera ready. That’s because even if you're not looking at them, they're looking at you. It helps build that connection.

Another thing that became huge for us, and we always preached this, was huddles and talking to your teams on a regular basis. We’re having these huddles with cameras so people are getting to see each other. At a managing director level, I will admit that we didn't have a daily huddle. We were making sure our teams did, but the four managing directors and senior managing directors weren't coming together.

Tracy Bower, Sherry Freitas, and all of our managing directors were on a call every morning Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM to 9:00 AM. We've scaled it back. We only do it three times a week. Three times a week at our level, we're still coming together to make sure we're all on the same page. It has brought us that much closer together as a company.

It's pretty amazing. I love that you said you have those things, like camera on. The camera is on all the time. It's right here to live inside this device and a camera will be on whether you want it or not. Having this type of awareness is a great deal. Be careful with the camera on all the time. You got to be ready to roll for the camera. In the next section of our conversation, I have some rapid-fire questions for you. Are you ready?

Okay.

For books, what are your favorite books? Fiction, non-fiction, or professional books, what do you like?

There are a ton of books in my office. It's hard. I don't have a ton of pleasure books I read. I end up reading more for work, and I love those. Atomic Habits is always going to be one of my favorite books when it comes to personal development. If you haven't read it, it's a fantastic read. Another one that's not so personal development but is a management lesson is a book titled Fearless. It's a story about a Navy SEAL.

It talks about his life from when before he joined the military through his time in the military. He did die in service, but it's telling his story. It's such an amazing leadership book in terms of how he led his team and the respect his team had for him. Anytime I'm asked about my favorite book, those two are always top of mind because they're two that I constantly refer back to.

The next question is related to failure. People tend to avoid the subject because they might think, “It's embarrassing. How could I talk about how many times I failed?” My question to you is, how did a failure or apparent failure set you up for future success?

I can answer that in so many ways. We have a saying around here. We say it two different ways. We say embrace failure, and then we say fail forward because it's not ever failing as long as you learn something from it. In being a company that pushes the boundaries and tries to be innovative in so many ways, I feel like we fail often or something doesn't work out.

I'm drawing a blank on one that comes to mind. There have been so many things that we've rolled out that were new technology or a new system that we wanted to test that didn't work. We tweaked that along the way or scrapped it and started over. If you don't put yourself out there and truly look at it as a failure, it's going to hold you back.

That's why they don't come to mind to me. There are times I have failed. There are times things didn't go the right way, but they're not drilled in my head as a failure. It's like, “That didn't work. Let's try again.” You can appreciate this because of the type of work you do, you're trying to staff certain assets. There's a group. We've been trying to figure out the best way to staff this group of assets because they're small. They're not all close to each other.

We’re like, “There are a couple that is over here and a couple that is over here. They don't need their own teams. How can we group them? How can we get everything we need done?” We started out one way, and that was mainly for the service side. We were like, “We'll have a service team that does these and we'll be good to go.” It didn't work. We were not firing on all cylinders. We weren't getting everything done that we needed to get done. We backed up.

There are a couple of different things that came out of this. One, this is for a build-to-rent portfolio. We acknowledged that we didn't have a great career path within our build-to-rent portfolio that attracted the right service team members. It was what people saw coming to a lower unit count and not the new and shiny high rise.

That’s a step back if they were an experienced service team member in multifamily. We were like, “We're wanting them to do multiple sites, so we need to create these layers.” We're going to have these layers based on the number of communities and how far apart they are that you have a service director, a multi-site service director, and an area service director, and then there's a portfolio.”

We created this career path, and in that, we also decided, “These properties, even though there are some here and some here but they’re in the same metro, we’re going to do a portfolio service director over all of them that can direct the teams in both locations.” This was something completely new to us on how to staff this many properties at one time that were small in count. We came up with one way and it didn't work. We then stepped back and created new titles and new positions and attracted better talent and the right talent for it.

I love the story. This is the future. It’s the present, but it's going to be the future. What advice would you have for a young college student coming out of college or graduating college? What would be some pieces of advice that you would find helpful for them when they get ready to enter the real world?

My advice is always the same in interviews. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to try. Don't be afraid to think outside the box. Don't go, “That's how it's always been done.” That doesn't mean it is how it should continue to be done. Especially people coming out of college or high school, they have a fresh perspective. They're speaking to a different generation. Bring those ideas, share those ideas, and speak your mind. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't look at it as a failure. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there.

The last thing goes to anyone regardless of age. Never stop learning. The second you stop learning is the second you're going to be stuck where you are. That can be taking classes, getting designations, or as simple as reading some of those books and exploring companies that are outside your industry and how they do things.

For us, looking at customer service, we always tried to emulate and did a ton of research on Disney, Ritz-Carlton, The Container Store, and Southwest Airlines. These are industries or companies that are known in other industries for their customer service or associate engagement. Don't be afraid to fail. Put yourself out there and never stop learning.

In the last few years, what belief, behavior, or habit has improved your life?

What improved my life the most is remembering and refocusing on taking care of yourself before you can take care of others. Taking time to love yourself isn't selfish. It isn't taking away from your job. It's not taking away from your family. It's not taking away from anything. You need that. I know I've mentioned Dr. Debbie a couple of times. She has something that she calls the golden goose. She has the goose calendar. The goose calendar is, what are you doing for yourself? You got to take care of the goose.

Her drilling that into my head years ago started resonating. It's like, “I have to take this time to recharge.” When you give yourself that time to recharge, you come back that much stronger. If you don't take time to care for yourself, you're going to struggle. Your mind is not going to be as sharp. You're not going to be able to help others as much. You're not going to be able to get as much done in a day. While you may think that taking 1 hour for yourself is taking 1 hour away from your productivity, it's boosting your productivity afterward by 3 or 4 hours of what you would lose if you didn't take that time.

When you lose focus or feel overwhelmed, how do you get back on track?

The number one thing that will truly reset me is to attend an associate event or go on-site. If I go do site visits or we’re having a training event going on and I go spend time at a training event, or I have the opportunity to do some of the training, being back in touch with our onsite teams and our associates and watching them interact with residents always refills me and gets me going again.

If that's not something that's feasible at that moment and I need a mental reset, I get up and go for a 30-minute walk. Get up, walk away, clear your mind, do something active for 30 minutes, and come back. Those are probably the two things I do the most, depending on what my flexibility is at the time.

Unfortunately, we're approaching the end of our conversation. I do want to give you the opportunity to say something to answer a question you wish I would've asked or cover a topic that you're very passionate about and didn't have the opportunity to bring it during our conversation.

You hit on all my big topics. If I could have written the questions myself, it would've been about the same as what you did. My biggest passion is developing our people. I know we hit on it and we talked about it, but I do feel there is a huge gap and a huge miss not just within our industry as a whole. We’re preparing our young people for the real world. We’re preparing them for a career and getting them started on a path that is going to make them successful versus having them come out of college with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt and still no career path.

I'm a huge advocate of, “Let’s get them started in a career. Let's give them classes that are relevant to how it can help them in our company, but also help them get where they want to be in life.” Hopefully, we would build that loyalty with them if we're pouring back into them that they're not going to leave us, but that's a risk we would have to take. I am so passionate about helping guide our young people to help them find their way.

I mentioned the story about my son. He graduated in 2021. It was the second year of COVID. Watching him, his friends, and the graduating class after him, I feel that these graduating classes, the kids who went back to school for a little bit longer in their high school careers maybe won't be the same. At least those 2 or 3 graduating classes from 2020 to 2022, I feel, are pushing the boundaries and not resonating with that everybody-has-to-go-to-college path.

They don't know what to do otherwise. They don't know what is out there for them if they don't go to college. Maybe they don't think trade school is their route because when they think trade school, they think of diesel mechanics, welders, or something like that. There are so many other options that as an industry, we have got to get in front of these young people. We've got to help them see what's out there. We’ve got to open those doors and help them along the way. There are so many of them that are lost.



This is such a great message and a great way to close our conversation. I would hope that if you have this type of initiative in the future, you will reach out. My show is completely open to this initiative. I'd like to make them public and make them available to the larger public because this is the only way for us to be a sustainable industry. It's also benefiting the younger generation in a tremendous way. Thank you very much for coming. I hope to get you back here in a few months to talk a little bit more about the project that you're on because this is an exciting time and is the future. It's going to be big in the future. Your company is already ahead of the curve. Thank you again for coming.

Thank you for having me. This was great. I'd be happy to come back and talk to you again.

Everybody, thank you very much for tuning in. I hope to see you back here soon. Have a great day.

Important Links

• RangeWater
• Atomic Habits
• Fearless

About Karen Key