Building Careers in Maintenance

[Jay Abney] (0:00 - 1:16) How do we drive the right people in? Oddly, it's not like we're the Freemasons, right? We don't have that kind of that idea behind us of poets.

It's this fraternal order. But once you get in after a few years, you realize it kind of is. It's a small community amongst us.

You know the players, you know the companies, you know the history, and it becomes something that you grow into. You got to start with what you're doing every day. You're a technician on a community.

You don't need to know everything. You never know everything, but learn as much as you can. I mean, at the end of the day, I want my service supervisors and technicians to walk on a property and feel like it's their community.

It's like walking past something in the front yard, right? Are you proud of it? Should it be done better?

Sometimes your worst experiences and your worst properties teach you the most. So if you're at a place like that, a lot of us just grin and laugh about it and get into it and get it done. We got a lot of opportunity to train.

It's really about time. I know that our industry is amazing. It can offer somebody that has no experience, but wants to be customer focused, wants to take care of people, has that innate need to fix things that are broken, things that people need you want to solve for.

That's our industry almost every day.

[Adrian Danila] (1:17 - 1:42) Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Multifamily X podcast, Masters of Maintenance. I want to thank our sponsors from Kairos and Appwork for making this podcast possible. Our guest today is a very, very special guest and a friend of our show and a friend of ours on other initiatives, leadership initiatives.

Jay Abney, welcome to the show, sir.

[Jay Abney] (1:42 - 1:45) Thank you, sir. I appreciate you having me on, Adrian.

[Adrian Danila] (1:45 - 1:54) Jay is the National Senior Director of Maintenance and Technical Education at Greystar. How many apartment homes under management currently?

[Jay Abney] (1:55 - 2:02) I think we've breached a million homes. We probably have about 3,500 communities currently, and it's still growing.

[Adrian Danila] (2:03 - 2:17) You just surpassed a million homes. That's just an incredible number. Congratulations on that.

Thank you. Jay, I want to start with your journey a little bit. How did you get into multifamily?

[Jay Abney] (2:17 - 3:27) Adrian, I think it's like most of us. You're looking for a job. I was 18 at the time.

I was good with my hands. I like to tear things down and so forth. When I ran across an open opportunity on the complex that I worked for and asked them if they had any job openings, they didn't, but they allowed me to be a porter.

They said they'd give me half off the rent and I jumped on that. They then decided the next day after I cleaned up the property that they still didn't have a role for me, but they would pay me $25 an hour to turn units and with no experience, no tools. It's just light bulbs, little things like that.

I knew something about electronics and appliances, so I brought my multimeter out. I started fixing things like range oven parts and things like that I would replace for them. I never really got paid for that.

From there, I just became an assistant. They made a place for me. About less than a year later, I became the service supervisor.

I threw into it, learned as I went, and it was trial by fire. That's what started my journey in 1985, Adrian.

[Adrian Danila] (3:28 - 3:34) That's been a couple of years back. Your journey starts in Chicago, right?

[Jay Abney] (3:34 - 3:41) It doesn't. It actually starts in a little suburb in Fort Worth, Texas. That was my first property, Westlake Garden Apartments.

[Adrian Danila] (3:42 - 3:44) How did you move from Texas to Chicago?

[Jay Abney] (3:45 - 7:32) I will be really brief and I'll give you kind of an overrun because it's a several-hour story in itself that we don't have time for here. I worked a few properties after that first one. I was fortunate to have a really good mentor on that first property that taught me a lot about air conditioning.

I could change out compressors and all that good stuff back in the 80s. That made me valuable. I could move from one property to a bigger property.

I was kind of hunting that bigger dollar. I did that for a few years in Texas. I took my first vacation ever in my life.

I went to Arizona. I fell in love with the desert. I had just become a CAMT certification holder in Texas.

I went straight to the local affiliate. I think it was the Arizona Multi-Housing Association. I said, Hey, I'm a CAMT.

Do you have any jobs? There was someone volunteering in there that was a regional property manager that said, Hey, talk to me. She gave me a month to move out to Arizona.

That began my career in Arizona. I probably spent 12 years all over the Valley, different types of assets. Fast forward, I started doing new lease ups for at the time it was Maximum Property Management.

Now it's Prometheus. My first lease up was in North Scottsdale. Successfully completed that.

We got some awards off that. I moved out and did some electronic work in Alabama of all places. Quickly, I wound up working for a private owner in Alabama.

I started doing maintenance work for him all over states and adjacent states. I got a call from Prometheus. I said, Hey, we got a lease up in Utah.

This is an 880 unit lease up. It was quite a jump in unit size for me. We thought of you first.

Would you like to do it? I jumped on it. I helped them lease up Sterling Village in South Jordan.

The market softened a few years later. Just before the millennium, I started looking around on my first computer ever. I bought a used computer from Prometheus.

I started looking on the website with those old dial-up modems. I started looking in the islands. I found a job in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

I actually called them on the phone. It was like, Hey, what does it take to do this? They asked for my resume.

I sent my resume out. Obviously, they liked it. They offered to fly me out.

I accepted that job in Ocean Club Resorts in the Turks and Caicos Islands. I brought in the millennium there. When we hit 2000, I was on the beach.

I was running two resorts as a chief engineer there. I spent about two, two and a half years out there. Then I came back, went back to San Jose and ran an 1100 unit lease up in Palm Valley in San Jose.

When we saw that they were going to sell, that's when I got headhunted to go to Chicago. I moved to Chicago in 2003. That was a quick run through of a lot of years, a lot of decades.

Chicago really changed the way. I've been through some resorts. I learned to work on wastewater treatment, 480 switch gears, which really wasn't in the cards at the time for a lot of the garden-style communities that I had managed before.

A lot of experiences along the way. Once I hit Chicago, and I'll stop there, that's where things started changing in terms of capabilities and learning opportunities.

[Adrian Danila] (7:33 - 7:35) Did you ever consider writing a book?

[Jay Abney] (7:37 - 8:14) Yes. It's funny that you mentioned that. I have enough experiences, but I'm going to be honest with you.

I would have to retire from the industry because the reason it may become a bestseller is because you have to tell all the juicy things, maybe minus names, but there's a lot of great experiences and interesting things along that journey that if I shared it, it would be better that I was retired. Most of those people are still alive, right? They're probably still alive, may watch this podcast, and they'll be going, yeah, don't use my name.

A lot of great experiences, mostly.

[Adrian Danila] (8:15 - 8:42) It's quite fascinating seeing the entire country, seeing the world, and learning and growing at the same time. I can't think of a better career than that. I want to go back to the very beginnings.

What were the things that you thought you knew about becoming a manager? When you first became a manager of people, a service manager, or whatever the title was at the time, and it wasn't so?

[Jay Abney] (8:44 - 9:51) I'd say the first thing I learned right away was becoming a service supervisor at 19 and having, say, painters turn over text that may have been twice your age at least. You have to develop a thick skin, and you have to get a little streetwise because you have to understand what you're looking for, and that's going to decide whether you're having a battle between two people because your age and your experience is going to come into play immediately if you're asking someone to do something or coaching them or even having to write them up. In a lot of cases, letting people go that were 35, 40 years old when you're 19, they don't take kindly to that.

Really, that's where I first had to realize I had to focus on what the goals were, what the end result was supposed to be because it really wasn't. It can't be about the person. It can't be about my experience at that time.

It had to be about what you're responsible for as a manager or a supervisor, and that's what you're asking for those people to do. If they can't make it, can you coach them? Can you point it out, and can you stand behind your choices?

[Adrian Danila] (9:51 - 9:59) From there on, when was the first time that you oversaw a portfolio of properties versus just one property?

[Jay Abney] (9:59 - 10:34) I think it was probably 1992. I'd been in Arizona a couple of years. I worked for an owner-manager, probably had a dozen or so communities, and he decided to get rid of his regional maintenance manager.

I won't say his name. He decided that what I was doing there resonated with him, and he made me the regional overall of his communities. I was maybe 22 at the time.

Again, I was in the same place, but I was running a portfolio of a dozen communities.

[Adrian Danila] (10:35 - 10:46) What were the things that you didn't know about doing multi-site when you first started doing multi-site? What were the things that you had to learn probably on a fast track?

[Jay Abney] (10:47 - 12:08) Well, I'll say, first of all, no cell phones. We didn't have computers. Everything was paper, pin-fed reports, things like that.

So I had to learn, first of all, how to look at the data and budgets and really just the associates themselves, where they were, if I was going to support them and lead them and see where we were going, provide a path forward for both themselves and the company. I had to learn to look at data in a bigger format, right? One.

And two, this is where you become a leader and you're trying to decide how to posture yourself. How should others see you and how you see yourself? And I'll say that I don't think I didn't come out of the gate as a great leader.

I didn't do anything bad that I regret, but I realized you're really focused on trying to be that role for others and how you look in that role. So there's a lot of, in your head at least, a defense, right? It's, am I this person?

Do they realize I'm the boss? Things like that. Things that you learn over time that aren't as near as important as what they are in the beginning.

So there really wasn't a mentor at the time to help me on how to become a leader. So I stumbled quite a bit in the beginning.

[Adrian Danila] (12:09 - 12:20) For someone that's a service manager at some point and wants to become a regional director, a regional service manager, what are the top pieces of advice that you have for them?

[Jay Abney] (12:21 - 13:16) I think learn your craft fairly well. We're never experts at anything because everything is changing. You know, we don't, most of us don't spend years in apprenticeships to learn one thing really well.

So we have to be good at, a little good at everything, but mostly being agile. And I think all that plays up to my point of humility. You have to be confident in what you're doing.

Everybody wants to have a leader, whoever is going to be, you know, driving the bus. Everybody wants to know that they know where they're going and if they can get them there. But realize early on that it's really not about having all the answers as much as it is about being there to support the teams and ask them what they think.

Don't be afraid to ask others what they think and how they would do it. It doesn't undermine who you are as a leader. It really enhances it, in my opinion.

[Adrian Danila] (13:16 - 13:21) Jay, what is the size of your team, the team that you're overseeing currently?

[Jay Abney] (13:21 - 15:09) Currently we have about 65 and I'll combine them together, what we call regional maintenance managers. And within those regions, there are some that have been promoted up to regional directors of maintenance. So in a lot of cases, those multiple regional maintenance managers in a certain, sometimes 13 or 14 states in a region will report up to that director of maintenance.

So about 65 currently. What is it like managing a team of 65 people? Well, and that's the point.

The first thing you have to say is I don't manage them. I don't hire them. They're regional leaders.

They're directors of real estate. Hire them. They report directly up to them.

And so that's the current way. They don't call me every day and say, what's the next thing to do, Jay? What I do is I support them.

I support a lot of initiatives that we put off at Graystar from the national or the corporate level down. I stay in communication with them. I have oversight over our inspection processes, our policies and maintenance and the training and learning environment.

So after saying that and creating, we have monthly meetings and things like that that I lead to keep us all as a group. But I'm really there for them. If they need something, if they run across a policy, if they run across something a client's asking about, I'm always available for them to call up or hit up on a team's call and say, Jay, what do you think about this?

What should be the direction? Or if they have a better way to do something, my ears are always open for that, too. So a lot of collaboration.

There's more collaboration amongst our department than there is direction from me, I would say.

[Adrian Danila] (15:09 - 15:27) I imagine that for a company your size, there's always a challenge in maintaining consistency. What are some things, what are some tips that you could share with the audience about maintaining consistency when you work for such a large organization?

[Jay Abney] (15:27 - 16:16) For us, it's really about procedures. We have to identify what Graystar deems priorities, the KPIs, the key performance indicators. What are we looking for in terms of pillars and core values?

So it really starts with that. What's the focus of Graystar as a company? And then it trickles down from there.

How do we achieve that? How do we maintain those goals? How do we maintain the integrity in what we do every day as operators?

And then it's how to discern that throughout the group and support it and identify those that are really change leaders or ahead of their game or have done something outstanding and to help coach those that might be struggling in that department. So it's really about setting the tone and then helping them to maintain it.

[Adrian Danila] (16:16 - 16:27) You also work with hospitality for a number of years. I will say that there's great things that are happening out there that probably Multifamily could learn from. Could you point a few of those?

[Jay Abney] (16:28 - 19:03) Sure. I'll say when I went into, and I'd worked for a couple of hotels off and on, a lot of times it was really small mom and pop stuff where you showed up and you just kind of fix some things and you had the experience or you learned to fix some things on the side in between multi-housing. But my first real dive into the resort and the hospitality sector was when I walked in one day and realized they're talking about standups.

I didn't know what a standup was. And I think that's a really good thing that the hospitality industry has that multi-housing could really benefit from. And that's the daily standup.

And what I learned from that is we had shifts most of the time. It could be graveyard shift and swing shift, but at least you had a couple of shifts in hotels because customers came in and out all times of the day and night. Things had to be maintained.

So on your shift standup, whether it be morning and afternoon, everybody had to come in and really there was somebody that usually led and it could be a shift leader. It could have been anyone as part of that faction, but it was really talking about what's happening, what's happened, where we're going to go. And it's just that constant communication on a routine basis.

And I think the biggest takeaway from that is everyone was important. And that leads me to my second bullet point, I guess, for hotels and hospitality is every role, just like in our industry, but it's really taught to, and you can see it daily where every role on that hotel affects the experience of the customer, right? The customer is there for a day or two, typically.

So every moment that you can impact their experience positively creates a brand champion. You want them to come back, whatever your brand is, you want to be a change agent for that. You want to have a positive effect so no role is too small and any role can have a negative impact if it's just somebody ignoring a response or they teach you to, if you're walking down a hallway and one of your customers comes by you, you look up, you smile, you look them in the eye, you engage them.

It's a big part of what I'd like to see more of in the multi-housing and we teach to that in our leadership training. But yeah, I think it's really engagement to the customer. Hospitality has to make every moment count in the experience of their customer and we should be too.

[Adrian Danila] (19:03 - 19:29) You're going on four decades in a maintenance arena. How do you see the cultural changes that affected the maintenance? Like from a cultural standpoint of like who people are, how they behave from a behavioral standpoint, how did that affect, how did that change over the course of almost four decades that you've been around?

The mentality, the way individuals approach work during those four decades.

[Jay Abney] (19:29 - 20:41) I think the work ethic was different, generally speaking, but I also think 30, 40 years ago, maintenance supervisors, technicians, we were still a handyman culture and that's what everyone called you, the handyman. And it wasn't that we weren't, it's just that in more modern society, we're working on much more intricate and complex buildings, assets, and it requires more than just a handyman. And I think we've built, we've come into our time where we're a trade amongst ourselves.

We still have to appreciate the primary trades that do a lot of training to become the apprenticeships and the masters that they are. We don't want to take away from those trades, but we have to appreciate that we can do the same thing in our own trade in a similar fashion. So I mean, to really answer your question, a big picture, some things have changed, some things haven't, but I think we are in a better position today to be seen and become a more professional trade than we were four decades ago.

[Dean Fung A Wing] (20:41 - 21:29) And now a word from Dean Fungawing, founder and CEO, Kairos. I can tell you, I've had clients that prior to installing our technology had seven figure losses, six figure losses. They install our tech, nothing, literally nothing.

It's like drops off and their insurance companies are calling us going, how are you doing this? I'm like, well, it just works. And we work with the customer.

So we don't just throw in tech, like a solution grenade, and then walk off. You actually have to have this sort of white glove approach to helping re-educate on board. There's this change management that's happening, right?

Staying on top of that, you really have to keep following up. And this kind of comes from my customer service side of being in a service driven business. It's like, yeah, tech is great, but serve the customer.

[Adrian Danila] (21:31 - 21:52) I want to stay a little bit on, you know, us being seen as, you know, a handyman or like used to be still a good part of, I guess, you know, the outside world is looking at us as, you know, people that are turning the wrench. So what do you think is the overlap between a service technician position and a service manager position? How much do they overlap percentage-wise?

[Jay Abney] (21:53 - 23:34) I think that it depends on the size of your community, right? If you're a two-man property, you're both doing a lot of the same work. The service supervisor hopefully has the experience to understand that there's some leadership values they have to take on.

They have to, you know, set the tone. They have to do most of the paperwork. They're the ones that, you know, report into the manager.

In some cases, they work in tandem. You know, I've worked on properties where me and the technician were almost the same. I still took ultimately responsibility and made some calls.

But, you know, we work things together. We painted together. We fixed, you know, work requests together.

And I think you just have to take the role that makes sense at the time or, I guess, set the tone on how you're going to work with someone. If you start getting into larger communities where you have multiple technicians, multiple roles, really, you know, as you probably know, the service supervisor, the maintenance manager role becomes more of an administrative role. And someone within that department has to start paying attention to budgets, to schedules, to vendors, and really making sure that their technicians and housekeepers and porters and groundskeepers, anyone that kind of are directly under them, you got to start worrying about the human factor.

You got to take care of them. So, you have to start walking away from maybe what you did best at the time, which was the turning the wrench, the painting the home, and you have to start mentoring and directing others. So, I think that's where you start establishing that separation.

[Adrian Danila] (23:36 - 23:56) Now, when transitioning from a service tech to a service manager or maintenance manager position, what are the essential traits or skills that, you know, someone should have or should acquire pretty fast in order to become successful that they don't typically get while they're a maintenance technician?

[Jay Abney] (23:57 - 26:35) I think you have to start learning how to, obviously, there's a lot of soft skills to be added in during the course. And we do that at Graystar to, you know, understand what you're doing there, understanding the big picture that we're serving the client and the residents concurrently. So, sometimes there are two different things, but they really should at the end of the day be the same thing.

So, understand where your role fits in there. And then, you know, start learning the fact that you have a budget. Everything costs money.

There has to be an ROI, return on investment for the client. So, you know, when you're a technician, it's really easy to say if I was the, if I was a supervisor, I would do this and I would buy more of that and I would do these things. And even the service supervisor oftentimes says that if they're not tied in and helps own the operations budget with the community manager.

So, understanding that financial part, because there is a middle ground between what you wish you could do and what you can do to operate. And also by the same token, how to stand up and say, I need this, right? And to explain and sometimes use some data that you have to win over an argument.

Maybe you need to replace some lights or LEDs would be the best idea instead of changing these old bulbs. And maybe I'm going back 20 years when that was a big thing. How did I win those arguments against, in some cases, a board, you know, other times just an ownership or my community manager.

It was setting down and trying to, and using the internet, building out a case of if we did this, this is what we would achieve. So understand how to build an argument for things that you need. And then lastly, understand your community.

I mean, you've got to start with what you're doing every day. You're a technician on a community. You don't need to know everything.

We never know everything, but learn as much as you can, because you need to be able to own that. I mean, at the end of the day, I want my service supervisors and technicians and all service teams to walk on a property and feel like it's their community and they're responsible for it. And if you walk past something, it's like walking past something in your front yard, right?

Are you proud of it? Should it be done better? And maybe you're not the person to do it, but learn that you have to speak up.

And that responsibility drives you to speak up, raise your hand and say, Hey, we need to do something about this. Maybe I don't know how, but I need to be able to go to the community manager and say, can we talk about it? So yeah, I think ownership is the first thing you have to learn if you're going to turn into a supervisor role.

[Adrian Danila] (26:36 - 28:04) You mentioned how you've gotten into multifamily and most people, over 95% of all professionals that I talk to, when I ask the question, how did you get into multifamily is by accident. Some accident will happen. Like it's a random thing.

How do we flip the script Jay? And how do we make this like a conscientious decision? How do we make people want to work in multifamily?

Because it's an amazing industry versus like just randomly running, like learning that there's even an industry called multifamily. And then they needed some help to pay the rent and the property offers discount, like something like totally random that gets them into industry. Because I'm asking this because I know so many professionals, maintenance or not, in an industry, they have amazing stellar careers, right?

They started at the very bottom as groundskeeper or leasing agent, and now they're running companies as CEOs, like multi-billion dollar companies. So those are amazing stories to be told, but we're still hearing the same story. We got into multifamily by accident.

So how do we make that a decision? How do we do better in communicating how great this industry is? So people are attracted to the industry because it's amazing, not just because there was some random situation that was presented to them, and they just ended up being here.

It's a great question.

[Jay Abney] (28:05 - 32:38) And every company is working on this constantly, like it's a big thing. It's a big forefront of all of our conversations, right? How do we drive the right people in and garner that interest, generate that interest to know that we exist?

And I think the funny thing is, oddly, it's not like we're the Freemasons, right? We don't have that kind of that austerity, that idea behind us of, oh, it's this fraternal order. But once you get in after a few years, you realize it kind of is.

It's a small community amongst us. As we both know, you've been in it long enough, you know the players, you know the companies, you know the history, and it becomes something that you grow into. But you didn't know it was there.

Most people won't see it from the outside at all. I think it's up to us, especially when we're in leadership roles, and we can help kind of drive the bus on how we approach that entry-level position, first of all. Because if you've been in the game a little bit, now you know a little bit more about it.

Now you know what you're looking for. And there's still all that stuff that you have to learn about a company and if it's right for you. But bringing in new blood, to our industry, I think starts with looking for them at the right place.

I always mention that I think high schools are a great place to get into VoTech and offer them the opportunity to see if they're good with their hands, and specifically, are they good with the things that we do every day, like the KMT training and similar skill sets. Because we have a high school in the individuals, a lot of them know what they want to do. They may be going to college, they may be going into other trades, they may be going into an entrepreneurial role, and that's excellent.

But for those that aren't really sure what they do, but like working with their hands, can we train them ahead of time? So by the time they're 18, by the time they're ready to start a job, have we provided them with something so they don't show up on a property and I saw you on an internet and we're looking for a warm body, they're a warm body and they don't know what that means. I like to prepare them ahead, that's one.

Go to the right place where we have individuals that are looking to start their career, but don't have an idea really what to do with it. Secondly, I think we have to prepare, and Graystar is working on this. I'll hopefully share this with you later on as it proceeds in the next year, but it's basically a leveling program.

Right now you walk in and you can be a technician and you can go onto a property on any of our communities, any one company's community. And depending on the size of that, if it's a two person property, how fast are you going to get thrown on call? And you don't know that property very much.

That's something we need to get around and we need to get away from. We need to be able to train our new hires better before we put that responsibility on them. And it's something that the industry in general has always been guilty of, right?

Because it just is what it is. We just don't have that apprenticeship program and some companies do, I think, and we're trying to build that. So I think a leveling program where you come in and you're trained to a certain level, have certain expectations, and we all understand it from the community manager, service supervisor down, this is the culture.

The new person gets shown this, gets trained this, gets hands-on, it moves up, you get promoted, you get a little bit of money, you get certifications and training based on that level. You've acquired that, you've proven you've acquired that, and so you have the skill set on paper in the system that proves that you're ready for the next promotion and the next promotion. And I think we need to be building that structure in our communities and a pathway that allows somebody that comes in to understand, you know, fairly quickly if it's, if they like it, if they like the job, because it's not for everyone, right?

And everyone's not going to like what we do and what it requires of us. But if you do, can you see where your career can go? And if you're lacking that after a while, we keep people from a year or two, and if they just can't see that, there's no visibility into where they could be promoted within the company, provided they like the culture of that company, they're going to move on to somewhere else that does offer them that.

[Adrian Danila] (32:39 - 32:48) So how do we do a better job at highlighting the career paths? Where they are versus where they could be three, five, ten years from now?

[Jay Abney] (32:48 - 34:29) I think it's understanding what that looks like. I mean, oftentimes, and we're, I mean, let's be honest, we're working on that right now, because we have to identify that. And we're not doing it in a silo.

I'm not sitting here for one afternoon and just writing it down. Now I could, but is that really effective? And is it really taking in a broader perspective?

So at Graystar, what we do is we go out to the field, and we ask those that are in the field, some that are brand new, that just been in it, and some that are tenured, you know, folk that have been in the industry almost as long as we are longer than we have. And we went out and we asked them very specific questions based on things that we do on the property. We pulled them off of work requests, you know, these are all the kinds of things you do, what are the proper levels, you know, at what point should a tech to a new, or tech one, a new tech, not be asked to go do this boiler repair or something, you know, so let's identify what we expect from that first year and make sure that we're training them on those basic things.

And then we need to be able to offer that training ahead before they're ready to take on that, that tech to job. And obviously it's a challenge for us because assets and communities are drastically different. So we have to find that sweet spot.

So answering your question, I think the company has to identify what you expect from those roles. What's the job description, you know, pay to that job description, pay it well enough that somebody wants to move up into that next job description when it becomes available. And it's a goal achieved, right?

[Adrian Danila] (34:30 - 35:03) Next, I want to go to learning, Jay. And I want to go down the memory line and say, ask you how was learning before the internet, maintenance learning, how did it transform after the internet? And then the second transformation, how did it transform in an era of smartphones, mobile technology?

So walk us through the memory line in regards to maintenance education and training. How did technology change?

[Jay Abney] (35:03 - 40:02) Sure Adrian. Well, you know, in the beginning, in the mid eighties, it was really about mentorship. You know, usually you took on a job and you had to learn from somebody that had learned from their own experiences.

In some cases, maybe it was an apprenticeship. In my case, I was fortunate that my service supervisor, I believe he was a technician from carrier. So he got trained classically at carrier corporation, and that was just luck.

And I got to tell you, you know, a lot of the other stuff I had learned by doing, right? But that one thing that first year taught me how to evacuate a system, how to charge a system, right? How to do that superheat and sub cooling, and also how to do the electrical, how to go through and troubleshoot the electrical.

And that was the biggest challenge. It was the biggest challenge and the most technical challenge of the day for the most part. Now, you know, in other urban areas and high rises in New York and Chicago, there were far more bigger things like boiler systems, chiller systems.

But for me on a garden style environment, I was, I got very fortunate, but really it was learning. You didn't have classes everywhere. If you did, you had to figure it out.

I will say that my first training aside from Tarrant County requiring me to go do a few hours, a half a day of learning how to perform pool chemistry to get my little card, which I still have, which also gave me a food handler certification, I think, because the restaurant industry, you know, really managed that process was when I was sitting on my third property in Texas. And I was looking through, I think it was the Tarrant County, T-A-C-C, Tarrant County or T-C-A-A, Tarrant County Apartment Association magazine. You know, back when we had magazines, we didn't have anything on the computers.

We had no computers. I was thumbing through that, waiting for my manager to get off a call. And I ran across the CAM-T opportunity.

And I was like, wow, didn't know it existed. You know, there was no one to tell you these things were out there really. And let's be honest in the mid eighties, the banks owned most of our things.

There weren't really any organized company structures to speak to. Maybe a bank representative came out, walked your property, but there was really no organization for me at the time anyway. And so I asked for that.

I begged for them to pay for that. And they did. And I've got to be honest, once I took CAM-T, I suddenly had that ability to see how to cut out R&R, a piece of asphalt, right?

Still just patching it, understanding the substrate, the compaction, and also understanding how to read, how to build an RFP and how to read those proposals to see if I was getting my money's worth, warranties, things like that. All that was very new to me. And that just, it blew my mind.

So from that point on, that really changed the trajectory of my competency and what I was looking for being a service supervisor. But to get back to the point, this was all very happenstance. You could just run across it.

It was who you met. It was the experiences you may have encountered on a property. And I would say this, sometimes your worst experiences and your worst properties teach you the most.

So if you're at a place like that, a lot of us just grin and laugh about it and get into it and get it done. Because that taught me the most. Some of my worst properties and sometimes some of my worst managers taught me the most.

Sometimes what not to be and what not to do, but it's all experience. But when we started having computers, you started realizing, let's cut through some of the decade of internet where everything was all over the place. Today, we have the opportunity to train and oftentimes for free.

The information is just a big fire hose out there. So you can learn really for free online. If you have the time and have a focus on what you're trying to find, a lot of information 24 seven.

So really, I think today, the question is, time is really valuable. Your time is really valuable. And I'm talking outside of the fact that I'm offering you training as an hourly person.

So we want you to train on our time. That's the way to do it. Really, as a company, I'm not going to ask you to go home and spend four hours of your time training offline.

But let me talk to you as an operator and say, in my life, if I wanted to learn something and I was eager to learn, let's talk like that or in that constraint. It's really focusing on what's a priority. What do you need to know?

What will make you better at your job today? And there's just so many things out there, Adrian. I mean, we've got a lot of opportunity to train.

It's really about time.

[Dean Fung A Wing] (40:02 - 40:06) And now a word from Sean Landsberg, co-founder, Appwork.

[Adrian Danila] (40:06 - 40:16) You mentioned feedback from the client. So typically, if I was to go with a big tech company and try to provide some feedback to improve their product, good luck with that. How does it work with Appwork?

[Sean Landsberg] (40:16 - 40:44) Yeah, I think that was based off of some of our own experiences that we've had as a management organization where we tried to work with some of the technology providers that we worked with and giving them feedback. And we kind of saw where that got us. And that was one of the things that when we launched Appwork, we wanted to help use to set ourselves apart where we can really leverage the collective feedback from our clients and use that to better our product.

Because I mean, who else are we building the product for, right?

[Adrian Danila] (40:45 - 41:15) So how would you envision if you were to be handed, probably you are, right? More or less currently, be handed the lead into creating the ideal maintenance training program. What would that look like, the details, right?

You know, is it mobile? Is it in person? It's like, what technology should we use?

Is it blanket training? Is it personal training? I'm not trying to lead you anywhere, but I'm just trying to create a frame for what I'm trying to ask.

[Jay Abney] (41:16 - 44:46) It's a little both. Yeah, but it's a little of all those things. But Adrian, we both know that really today our demographics really are on the phone more than anything.

So having a mobile capability for learning when you can, as you can, is super valuable. So I think the technology and we've got a lot of opportunities out there. We've got a lot of companies that have met that challenge.

And there are challenges to it because, you know, there are different modes of training and everyone learns a little different. So is the training going to be something where you're looking at us like right now and we're going to take apart a GFI or show you how to wire a GFI and talk about that? Or is it going to be a series of quizzes and pictures and things like that?

So usually you find that in one platform or the other. So I think the challenge is which platform would a company choose because there's a myriad of different learning styles. For me, that's one of the toughest things to try to figure out is can you get everything in one learning platform?

And it's not really, it's a challenge. But that being said, I think it's from that point on, it's going back to what we talked about. It's trying to not throw everything out there to one of our team members because that becomes white noise.

And most, some will go and find it and pull out what they want to and thrive in it. But most will say, well, it's a lot and I just can't, I don't have the time to put the attention to figure out what you have. There's just a lot there.

So we have to be able to curate the content. Again, back to that job description. What do we want out of that team member that we have on the site?

We have to curate that and we have to pay attention to the data that we get back. We got to really pay attention to whether or not it resonates with them or not and maybe ask them and poll them and work on that. So that's, I think, where it starts.

We don't always have all the answers. We have to pay attention and be humble and be open to see what they like, because if they don't come to the trough of training, then we got to find another way to pull them in. Because at the end of the day, the better the operators, the better the end result, the more efficient we become at doing what we do.

So I think the online training is a big deal. We curate and create some training in our LMS. And that's required because sometimes, you know, what's hard to find out there, Adrian, it's a lot of training, especially environmental training that's poignant to our industry. I can find hot work training videos and, you know, kind of exams and things like that.

But they're oftentimes they're structured in a industrial environment, you know, a commercial environment. And that environment is, well, I can still kind of pull out, extract the basic tenants and the basic idea that we want around, you know, hot work training or even lockout tagout. It would be better if it was designed within our industry.

So that's something I would say for those that are curating training. If you're looking to get into the multi-housing industry, start looking at some of that training that doesn't, it's out there. It's very important for our industry, but doesn't really align with the apartment, you know, the multi-housing environment, if you will.

But yeah, I think we have to build the curriculum for them, Adrian, based on what we want that team member to learn.

[Adrian Danila] (44:46 - 45:46) I want to stay a little bit on technology and we're basically drowning in technology. There's technology everywhere you look around, there's technology, everything's always in just, you know, in your hometown, current hometown in Arizona. And everything's like, there's a concierge for a few hours a day and everything else is like down on the phone.

And I stayed at an apartment community that actually is like, you know, also like they do hospitality. They don't just do like long-term leases. I stayed there, I rented an apartment for two days and everything's been automized.

Even like, you know, you can order a coffee with your phone. You scan the QR code, you order the coffee that you want. They had like a mind-blowing selection, just like Starbucks, 30, 40 types of like cappuccinos and lattes and everything.

Everything's automated, everything like amazing experience, right? So how do you vet technology? How do you vet technology when it comes to technology that pertains to maintenance?

What are your processes? What's your way of vetting technology?

[Jay Abney] (45:47 - 51:48) Well, first I'll say maintenance has an advantage over a lot of the other technologies that you're mentioning. So that's what you're coming about is a lot is in hospitality. So, you know, are you really offering your customer base, which is what everyone kind of has to, at the end of the day, look at what they want.

And in a lot of cases, quite a few want to have everything automated and it's the coolest thing and it's in the now. And it certainly is. That's where we're trending these days, just as part of the culture globally.

There's a lot of other ones that don't want to, they want the human, they want to be able to walk up to somebody, ask them a question, you know, appreciate that human interaction. And industries have to figure out what, sometimes, because it didn't work out and it failed, because, you know, a lot of things have to fail for us to understand. But if we're really paying attention to the data, we try to get in front of that so we don't fail bad.

We adapt based on what's coming in. So back to our industry, back to our part of that, our department, most of it's back of the house technology. Some of it is interacting with the resident through texting and through constant touch points to let them know once they have a service request, for example, where we're at, what we did, you know, if we have to reschedule.

Those things are really good tools we have today in certain tech that we didn't have before. And I think that is where it comes back to training and finding the right individuals for the service teams. Because, yes, today is a technology where we should be performing our next work request, performing our inspections, capturing the pictures, capturing really like data nameplates, things like that for asset tracking.

All of this is really a function of a mobile device. Because if you're not, and I know, you know, I'd still say, I'd venture to say the majority of our communities, both ours and others, are still doing things, even though we're a paperless company, we're still doing things on paper. We'll print out a work request and someone will go out and take that work request and jot something down and bring it back.

And now we have our service supervisor, perhaps, or maybe an admin, maybe a leasing agent, maybe a community manager, that's doing all the paperwork. Because a lot of this is because we historically just never had enough labor on site, right? So if your priority is to turn units and get work orders done and shut that flood off, that's what our service teams do.

Leasing doesn't get off their chair. They shouldn't. That's not what they're trained to do.

That's not what they signed up for. So that's their priority. They're going to run and go do that.

So at the end of the day, if paperwork doesn't get done, if it doesn't get documented, if inspection doesn't get done, that is a less concern to them than shutting that water off and cleaning something up, taking care of those fires, if you will, that show up almost every day on our communities. But getting past that, embracing the technology that we have today, especially with mobile technology, with PMS systems, with the overlays to the PMS systems, which we're investigating a whole new way and I'm really excited about it myself. It's really understanding and creating a paradigm shift in the service teams.

They historically have done it the way I just described to realizing if you can embrace that and really understand how to use that and stick with it, then that creates huge efficiencies that add up over time. Because now you're going out and you're getting an email. Now you know where to go.

And while you're in that apartment, you can go and in a lot of, I'm just referring to an app I'm looking at, you can see anything else that's open that might need to be done in that unit while you're there. It's all at your fingertips. You can take pictures, you can make comments, you can text another, you know, you can text your service supervisor, maybe ask a question, ask someone to bring something to you.

You can complete that and you can move on to the next one. No paperwork to be done. It's instantly in the PMS. It's instantly documented. It's instantly updated on a board. Somebody else may be watching to see if you've got 12 technicians on a property, which happens, right? And maybe you've got that centralized person, same with turnovers.

And I put this in technology. Think about a turnover, you know, lost revenue is a big thing, but you know, do all service teams understand what that means? So, you know, if you've got a unit that's setting, they're ready to be turned.

And a lot of our markets are 95% on average leased up, right? So it's not like we're in an era right now where a lot of units are just setting, you know, how fast we can turn them determines how fast we can make that revenue. Understand that a client's paying for that unit to set there in so many ways and labor and mortgage and insurance and utilities that have to keep that unit alive and ready to go, but they're not getting any returns.

So the faster you can turn that unit in a good way, you want to turn it well, but the faster you can turn that unit, the faster your company and the client makes money, or at least doesn't lose money. So that's huge. But how do you know what you're doing?

If you can't measure those KPIs, those indicators, if you can't see the trends. So technology offers those to us on a dashboard these days. And that dashboard can pulled up on an iPad or a phone.

I can see my entire portfolio of 3,500 communities on these dashboards and I can drill down to regions. I can add custom reports. BI reporting these days is just a big game changer, right?

So it's become a game of data and it starts with the technology being adopted on the property level and trained well. And that's the, that's, I think the biggest challenge for us these days is getting that technology to be used correctly and embraced on site.

[Adrian Danila] (51:48 - 52:47) A million units under management, it's a story for the ages to be told. Your next competitor is about 20% that size. I mean like 80% smaller, the number two competitor.

So that says a lot about this amazing story that has been Greystar. I've been part of that story for seven years myself, a few years back, just amazing things. Of course, many have changed since I left the company.

It's been over 10 years. I'd like to give you the opportunity to share some great things that someone could benefit from when working for Greystar on a facility site. Why should they join your group?

I want to give you the opportunity to share that. I think it's important. There's many looking out there and a lot of them just don't know maybe a lot or anything about your company.

What is that they should know that you would like them to know?

[Jay Abney] (52:48 - 58:33) Well, I would say first and foremost, I've worked for a lot of companies. I mean, I bounced around, I usually say two years, six months was my average on certainly multi-housing communities, not all of them. Some I stayed on for longer and I worked for some amazing companies and amazing people and with them.

But I would comfortably say Greystar is, in my opinion, the most amazing company I've worked for to date and hopefully the last one I do because they really stick true to their cores and values. Now, let me be clear. Every company has communities ran by people.

Some residents get upset because those people on our communities, whether it's us or others, don't demonstrate the values and pillars that the company holds. And so it's all about humans. At the end of the day, we're not perfect.

We're not really any better than anyone else in terms of operations just because we're Greystar. If anything, I'm more humble because I'm working for Greystar than maybe I was in the past because it is an immense undertaking and it's not me. I don't approach anyone as like the king of maintenance and nobody expects me to be.

And I think that's the first thing to say at Greystar is it's really a community. And I'll say at the corporate level and from what I've seen on the community levels, it's the same. Again, I say everything's a little different on cultures, on communities, just to be fair.

But from the corporate level down, everyone really engages with each other at kind of this equal playing field. I haven't ran across once a personality or an ego that I felt I couldn't approach. There's nobody that's strong-arming anybody or bullying or the leadership is just incredible here.

The amount of brainpower in all these departments, and we have many, is incredible. They're always looking for the best people. So I'll stop there and say that's kind of the corporate sector.

We're all at the end of the day. Our mentality is we're here to support the teams that are at the end of the day doing the work on the community. That is a common theme across every department, across every leader I've ever talked to.

And that's why I say for my own role, it's really making sure you have the tools and the understanding and the support to take care of our clients and take care of our residents, because at the end of the day, that's what we all exist to do. And they have that consistent theme across the company. That being said, they're eager to also offer training, leadership training, technical training, which is why I've got that label in my role, is to develop as much as we can.

Now, the problem is, is always how do we get that much training to a person? So you have to be patient. You have to find ways to do that.

But I collaborate with teams. Servant leadership is alive and well at Graystar. Now, let's talk about what's in it for you as an operator coming to the community.

Well, you have a company that's privately owned. We have picked up a lot of companies that have become Graystar, a lot of great talent. And I have been severanced from the finest companies, I always say.

I've had hotels bought out and being the top, I wind up getting severance and I have to go to another state, find another opportunity that fits what I need. I've had takeovers where the culture changes. Graystar being privately held and the largest, it's a pretty stable company, if you want to call it that, for the ability to choose a company to grow with, right, into the future.

Another point is we've got great assets. We're not going to go under any time soon. We have, we're always pulling in different types of business.

That's one of the newest things Graystar is looking at is branching out into infrastructure. I presume that's data centers and transportation opportunities, things that are big picture for us now, but they've publicly communicated that. So Graystar is morphing into a bigger community and a bigger company than it is right now.

We're not afraid of growing. We've decided we want to do things, a few things really well, and that's been our credo lately. But I think overall, it's, you have to know these things exist when you come on a community.

You have to ask questions. You have to tap into that because there's an amazing structure that we're building for Graystar, but you have to know it exists there. And that's one of the challenges for any company is to let people know on the property level what we think is all these great opportunities available to you.

That's the hardest thing is to get it down to those that are working every day. They show up and something's flooding from the minute they get on the property. And from there it goes and letting them know that they could have a career here.

We promote from within. That's a big one. I would say 98% of my RMMs were promoted from within.

So they worked for the company, they worked on site, they know Graystar, they grew up with Graystar, and now they're leading the teams. And that's the first thing we look for is promotion from within. And we want you to be better at what you do.

We want to give you all of that training, all that opportunity, and we want you to stay with us. So you're talking about a million units, 3,500 communities across, and I'm just talking about the U.S. here. If you want to transfer, if you want to move to something else, if you want to get into mid-rise, the high-rise, it's really just about looking at those internal opportunities because we encourage those that if you're looking for another challenge or if you need to move somewhere, maybe you need to be closer to family, maybe you need something different as a lifestyle, we can offer that at Graystar. Working for smaller companies, maybe you have to wait for an opportunity to come up in that company because they have 40, 50, 100 communities, right?

[Adrian Danila] (58:33 - 59:04) Amazing conversation and I'm very appreciative of you taking the time to be with me and with the audience today. In closing of this conversation, and hopefully this is just a segue to our second conversation, I hope to get you back here soon because I have a list of probably 20, 30 other questions that I wanted to ask. Obviously, time is not a friend.

What would you like to say in closing of this conversation as a segue to episode number two with Jay?

[Jay Abney] (59:05 - 1:00:12) Well, Adrian, first of all, I appreciate the fact that you developed Multifamily X. I know your story and it aligns with all of ours, right? Sometimes adversarial conditions offer amazing opportunities for change and you certainly have taken on that and created something that I think is going to blow up.

So thank you for offering this platform for me and other maintenance people in the business as well. I know that our industry is amazing. It can offer somebody that has no experience but wants to be customer focused, wants to take care of people, has that innate need to fix things that are broken, things that people need you want to solve for.

That's our industry almost every day. So we're looking for those types of people and we're perfect examples. You can build a career out of it, a really good career if you're willing to put in the time and the work and have sometimes patience, right?

So it's an amazing opportunity and I'm happy to share whatever experiences I have that could help the next generation.

[Adrian Danila] (1:00:13 - 1:00:49) Jay, once again, thank you for being with us today. Hopefully, we could make happen a second episode kind of back to back to this. Obviously, with respect to the time that you have available and everything has been fascinating.

Everybody, thank you so much for being with us today, for watching, for listening to us. If you're listening on a podcast app and I want to thank our sponsors from Kairos and Upwork for making this podcast possible. I'm Adrian Danila, your host.

This is Multifamily X podcast, Masters of Maintenance and I hope to see you back here soon. Take care. Have an amazing day.