When Jessica Heckman began working at Branchburg, New Jersey-based property manager Larken Associates in 2008, she was the point person for the company’s centralized maintenance operations, responsible for scheduling appointments across 250 units.
Today, that system no longer exists. The company entirely eliminated off-site maintenance pods from its portfolio in 2016, according to Heckman, and never expanded into centralized leasing or operations. Instead, it maintains a dedicated staff for each of its properties in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“One of the ways that we're trying to differentiate ourselves from our competitors is our ability to provide top-notch customer service,” Heckman, Larken’s director of residential asset management, told Multifamily Dive. “Having shared staff or staff that may be off-site somewhere takes away from that.”
Earlier this month, Larken Associates won the New Jersey Apartment Association’s Excellence in Property Management award for its management of Autumn Ridge at Lopatcong, a Class A, 148-unit property in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. The property’s team consists of a manager, a leasing consultant, a maintenance supervisor, two maintenance technicians and two full-time porters, all dedicated only to that site.
Most recently, the company broke ground on Trailside Village, a new mixed-use property in Forks Township, Pennsylvania. With 420 units at full buildout, it will be the company’s largest property to date, bringing its total unit count to 2,800 across all its markets. Like Autumn Ridge, it will be equipped with a dedicated property management team, according to a release shared with Multifamily Dive.
Here, Heckman speaks with Multifamily Dive about Larken’s management strategy, its views on centralization and its plans for growth.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
MULTIFAMILY DIVE: Could you talk about Autumn Ridge at Lopatcong, for which you won an award?
JESSICA HECKMAN: Autumn Ridge at Lopatcong was our first Class A luxury development that we built from the ground up. We've had several since then, but Autumn Ridge was the first one.
It came online in 2020 with 198 units, and 20% of that is affordable housing. The rest is market rate. It has garage-style apartments, and then it also has garden-style apartments, and then we have a whole slate of amenities available to all our residents.
This location does have one building that's 55 and older, a senior building. And these residents have their own amenities. So they have their own pool, and then there's a pool for the rest of the community as well.
We have a clubhouse, we have a fitness center. We have a tot lot with an outdoor area and walking paths. We have a package concierge and a trash concierge in place there as well. That's what you would expect for that sort of luxury brand.
What sets Larken apart on property management?
The customer service aspect. I think that that's really what differentiates us. We take great pride in what we build and what, you know, we lease out to our residents, but other people do as well.
We really need to differentiate that customer service so that is with our property management staff and how they approach everything from that initial point of contact to when somebody's moving out.
We found that residents really like having somebody they're familiar with, the person that walked them through the entire leasing process and did their move-in inspection with them. They know the names of their kids and their dogs and things like that.
Why did you decide to veer away from centralization?
Residents are much more comfortable having somebody available to them. So we like to have that staff available on site, and for them to recognize the maintenance team that's coming to their property to do their maintenance.
If you have an emergency at 3 a.m. and a man shows up on your doorstep, you want it to be somebody that you're familiar with. We've had great success with keeping these sites fully staffed, and I don't really see a reason that we would need to change that.
I talk to a lot of people in the industry, and they love the centralization. At the end of the day that boils down to the bottom line, right? And I understand that. I'm director of residential asset management. My job is to look at those bottom line numbers, but I also have to determine how that's going to impact the value of what we're offering.
I think for what we're trying to offer, we've seen great rapport with our residents having that staff they're comfortable with.
How do you make use of technology in your operations?
We are always willing to be beta testers for different tech. We have a chatbot on our website. We have an email bot. What that does is, when somebody contacts us, whether it's through one of our email lead services or on our website, those bots will answer everything until they get stumped. But that means that my leasing staff is not having to do that. The first month that we rolled it out at one location, we saved over 55 man hours.
How do you plan to refine your strategy as time goes on?
I think a lot of it comes down to training. We develop courses internally. We're in the process of developing a leadership training course that really allows our team to manage their residents, but also manage their team.
We also always have our eyes open for any kind of technology that we think could streamline our operations. The more we can get away from some of those tedious tasks, which take up a lot of time in this industry, that's just more time that we can devote to resident events, interacting with our residents, developing things that we know will keep people happy to call this place their community.
