So while you are in the middle of this big global pandemic, what are you doing to get ready for the new normal?  The next normal will be different. Here are my predictions.

ZOOM Meetings Will Continue…and They Will be Effective

Most everyone is doing it…online meetings.  They are not virtual, they are real and they are more efficient and much cheaper than face to face.  Many of us have learned to make these sort of team gatherings work quite well and are becoming creative and bold in our prep and direction of the “ZOOM”.  Employees who cannot adapt to this sort of team meeting will be left behind.  

Training Will Adapt to Online in New and Unique Ways

The canned online training sites will get better, more impactful in creating positive change and growth in skillsets.  It will also get a lot cheaper.  Technology will make packaged leasing, customer service, and fair housing courses more interactive and enjoyable.  Employees will consider online training fun and look forward to these high-tech presentations taught by almost life-like avatars.   Again, it will be a lot cheaper.  

Expert and guest speakers will still be popular but will present live, online, eventually as a life-size hologram .  Travel costs will be eliminated and their speaker fees will drop as they begin to compete with popular industry avatars.

On-site Leasing will continue to become More “self-service” and the real live leasing professionals will be as rare as gas station attendants.  

The pandemic has already proven that rental prospects can look and lease on their own.  Leasing professionals will morph into true property account representatives and bring a wide variety of online marketing, assessment, and retention expertise as well as excellent sales skills.  They will often make more money than the manager with 50% to 60% of their income commission based.  Their first priority will be customer retention.

Your Direct Supervisor - Your Boss - may live in Madrid or Singapore and you may never actually meet her.

Middle management will become obsolete as onsite team members see their job scope expand significantly and performance demands increase to a mid-management level.  The onsite manager will have to have the education and experience of a regional or assistant VP.  Their boss will be a third party who acts more as an asset manager and accountability partner.  The onsite manager’s salary will double.  Those with the best people skills will see their income triple.

The Regional Manager position will be gone but these talented individuals will have important roles as onsite business managers.  (After all, don’t we always wish the regional could just run the darn property?)  Rather than managing multiple sites and herding 6 to 10 managers all who were never really qualified to run the multimillion dollar assets where they worked, the “Regional”, these higher level property management pros, will be making the same money running one apartment community while making a greater impact on NOI.  

Talent will be the Most Valuable Commodity

Our industry already pays lip service to the importance of people.  But the new normal will back that talk with real compensation.  The best onsite talent will be offered ownership or interest in the asset they manage.  Recruiting and finding talent will be a HUGE business as more companies rely on headhunters to identify superstars.  We will have to raid the high end hospitality industry at first to meet the demand for this new model of onsite professional.