Has your company eliminated the assistant manager role?

If so, how did it impact the onsite team? What are the pros and cons. Of course our company is selling it as a positive but from the few I have heard they don’t like it and it eliminates jobs.

It doesn't work. If your company is thinking about taking those responsibilities and centralizing them don't do it. Its important to have that extra person on site. It puts too much on the onsite team, especially with properties with a high unit count.

They did, then they brought in a new role which would have been below APM but was just as much work, and then they got rid of that brought back APM. They tried centralizing years ago before it was a big thing and it caused a lot of property teams to be bitter because we always caught mistakes of the centralized person.

We’ve transitioned to an offsite ACM and it has been wonderful. As the manager, it has made my life exponentially easier having someone dedicated to all ACM tasks without having to be prompted, reminded, etc.
My current ACM is going to be phased out because of it, but there are also performance and disciplinary issues so their departure from the property is inevitable.
If you have a strong ACM onsite I can see how eliminating the role could be a negative, but from my experience with it I have no complaints.

Yes, we have a centralized support person who handles the APM tasks and the “busy work” that I had to do at every other job. We now have 2 leasing professionals instead of an APM and a LP. It works!

Many companies are going to centralized administrative processes and it saves money plus allows the onsite teams to focus more on leasing and residents.

Where does the next PM come from ?
Every organization has need for task execution, client engagement, and organizational development.
When you stop organizational development , you are not sustainable.

Our company is selling our complex and what it seems like the new company will downsize because they think we are "overstaffed". In my opinion, we are not overstaffed. It makes a lot of difference to have an extra person on site.

I have been at 240 units and we tried eliminating the APM role and centralizing the PM admin tasks. The centralized person is amazing- thorough, detailed, and willing to help in any way they can. BUT. 2 people in the office was hard, more than hard- we were running ourselves ragged trying to keep up with everything. If one person was OOO, it was overwhelming. Residents saw the difference bc the PM was so busy leasing, standards were not being maintained on the property. Prospects would call, but calls weren’t getting answered bc the one person was assisting someone else- we would call back, but they had often moved on. Same for walk-in tours. They would see the line of people waiting to be helped and just leave.
If you go centralized, hire a part time person onsite.

I shared this in the Multifamily ShareSpace and executives should take note of the sentiment bubbling up at the property level:

"An APM does so much more than collect rent."

"Expectations are no longer reality im this industry. It's disheartening and sad. "Do more, more and more". No Sir, you need to manage your Expectations and you need to do better. Stop acting like your onsite teams are robots who are never going to give out."

"Retired about 18 months ago. I did 40 years in this industry. Your immediate supervisor probably does care and understand but the big dogs generally don't give a damn about those that are on site. There are some exceptions and I enjoyed that at times in my career. My last company put on a good show to try to keep people but reality was that they could not have cared any less than they did. I probably would have worked longer but they truly made me hate what I was doing and I decided to throw in the towel. My assistant was amazing and she left the industry forever after my retirement because they were so awful. There is a lot of incompetence in upper management out there. They literally don't get it."

"Corporate and owners don't care though. That's the issue, less payroll for them to have to pay out. Less benefits. And they'll replace anyone who speaks up in a heartbeat."

"One less person to suffer in a lost situation.
Just remember, you're not on site to help but to bring you in as much money as possible. That's it."