Property management companies typically appreciate stability.
Cutting down on tenant turnover, apartment drama and regulatory changes are good for a business predicated on overseeing a passive stream of income.
And after nearly three straight years of pandemic-related upheaval, this year represented somewhat of a return to the status quo for the industry, according to Rose Associates’ Scott Marino.
“That first year of Covid was dreadful, but then after that, real estate came back very strong and there were nearly two years of catching up,” Marino said. “Well, late 2023 and pretty much all of 2024 are just kind of normal, right? They were back to the old way of doing things.”
That stability has factored into ranking New York City’s property management firms.
The Real Deal analyzed the number of units under management as of Sept. 27 using building data from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development from all five boroughs.
There’s been remarkably little movement since last year’s rankings, with the top six managers retaining their spots and the next four playing musical chairs.
But beneath the relatively stable surface, the competition for properties has only heated up, spurred on by a dried-up multifamily and condo pipeline that’s battling increased lending and construction costs.
“If there’s not a lot of new products being built, there’s not a lot of potential growth opportunity for us, and so we end up, and our peers end up, all trying to compete with one another on the existing business,” said Marino, whose firm placed seventh, but claims to be the city’s largest rental-only property manager. “We are seeing this year, really, a shift in our peers looking more at one another to try to move business in order to fuel growth.”
“If there’s not a lot of new products being built, there’s not a lot of potential growth opportunity for us.”
Most wandering eyes will inevitably turn to FirstService Residential, the property management behemoth atop the list with nearly 100,000 units under management.
FirstService Residential added more than 4,000 units in the past year and it’s broken free from the pack thanks to an aggressive M&A strategy, acquiring Charles H. Greenthal & Co. and Tudor Realty Services Corp. in 2023. In 2021, FirstService also added Midboro Management and its roughly 15,000 units.
But FirstService’s competitors, including longtime number two AKAM Associates, see an opportunity to take advantage of firms that pursue a growth strategy that can lead to some awkward fits.
“I think we’ve been a great beneficiary of taking properties from some competitors that were part of an acquisition where maybe they weren’t as successful as the buyer would have hoped,” said AKAM CEO Ken Greene.
FirstService CEO David Diestel acknowledged some growing pains for FirstService in relation to its acquisition strategy as it spent the past year and a half integrating those new assets into its business.
“The acquisitions have done well,” Diestel said, but he admitted that the company has lost properties in the process.
And although AKAM has moved over roughly 1,500 units from FirstService-managed properties, according to TRD Data, it still remains nearly 40,000 units below FirstService, putting it closer to number three, Douglas Elliman Property Management, and number four, Metro Management Development, which added more than 9,000 units.
AKAM’s Greene said by offering better service, he believes growth — and a spot atop the leaderboard — will follow naturally.
“We ultimately believe we will become the largest, and we’ll celebrate that when that happens,” Greene said.
Hard costs
As firms jostle for position in the current market, the ability to manage costs has emerged as a key problem every owner needs help addressing.
A report from FirstService found that costs associated with high-rise buildings increased by 5 to 7 percent from 2023 to 2024 due to the expenses related to complying with sustainability regulations and property and liability insurance, which has proven to be a growing bugaboo.
From 2020 to 2023, average insurance premiums more than doubled in Brooklyn, and they rose by more than 50 percent in Manhattan and Queens for buildings with at least 50 units, THE CITY found.
Heavyweights such as FirstService and AKAM have taken advantage of their size to find savings for building owners.
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FirstService has negotiated a deal with cable provider Charter/Spectrum that it claims saves customers $720 per year, while AKAM’s Greene said the company was able to negotiate directly with gas detector manufacturers to slash $20 off their prices. (Local Law 157 requires gas detectors within 10 feet of gas appliances in residential units by May 2025.)
For affordable housing managers, struggles collecting rent have squeezed building margins even tighter. Wavecrest Management, which placed fifth in the rankings and specializes in affordable housing, saw its monthly rent collection fall from more than 97 percent to less than 95 percent, according to president Joey Camerata.
Meanwhile, Local Law 97, which penalizes owners that don’t hit carbon emissions goals starting in 2024, still looms large. The Real Estate Board of New York estimated that the city could levy as much as $900 million in law-related fines annually by 2030.
Enforcement is expected to begin in May (the law is currently being challenged in state court), and property managers are running point on identifying issues in non-compliant buildings, running an RFP process to get regulators to evaluate and audit buildings and overseeing projects to improve energy efficiency.
“A lot of these properties — by 2030 — they’ve really got some big, big jumps to make,” Greene said.
Get smart
The industry also hasn’t been immune to the artificial intelligence boom, especially as it allows companies to outsource customer service to a non-sentient chatbot.
But firms are finding other novel solutions for the popular technology. Rose is currently using AI for its fraud prevention efforts to detect applicants using false names or incomes, while AKAM is using the tech for its closing and leasing processes to automatically check responses on questionnaires submitted by prospective tenants.
Firms have also tried to grow more discerning about not fitting a square peg into a round hole when it comes to solving problems digitally.
“It seems cool, it seems awesome, it appears to solve a problem, but it doesn’t communicate with anything else that you have,” Marino said of past attempts to streamline operations. “The days of us just trying the tech because it seems cool, like the shiny object, are over.”
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