Job Title: Community Manager
Location: Mobile, AL
Submitted on: 25-Jun-03
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I have been in this business 30 years and love it! AIMCO is the 4th
Property Management Company I have worked for. Two were much smaller
and the other was NCHP who was bought out by AIMCO.
When AIMCO bought NCHP, I resigned and went into Public Housing
Management rather than work for them. I returned to this site when I
was told it was about to be sold to another company. All this was to
minimize any time as an AIMCO employee!
AIMCO is large and profitable, as was NCHP. However, AIMCO has a way of
draining all profit from a property and allowing it to decay. They are
driven strioctly by numbers and forget about both their residents and
their employees. Even on a Corporate level, I hear frequent rumblings
of distrust and frustration.
The Regional Property Managers have too many sites in their portfolios
to monitor and manage effectively!
One of the biggest cost saving moves has been to minimize training for
field employees. While it may save dollars in some ways, I believe they
are paying more in law suits, claims, mis-spent money, having to do
things more than once, diminished customer satisfaction and higher
vacancies, etc.
There is minimal appreciation expressed to employees beyond a regular
paycheck. Often, bonus payments never make their way to the employees
who earned them; or they are extremely late. If an employee earns a
bonus because of performance, but leaves before it is distributed, they
are not allowed to get it! Yet the employee has little or no control
over when it is distributed. In the case of CM's, I'm told the RPM gets
it if the employee has left!
They have an excellent set of Benchmarks that are not well maintained
with updates. For example, I recently tried to file an Incident Report
in anticipation of a Liability Claim. I went to the Benchmark, got the
form, completed it, and tried to fax it as directed on the form. The
number was changed nearly a year ago, but I had no update!
All employees I have met on the site level are afraid or distrustful of
Corporate. Trust is such a big factor that I would expect that AIMCO
does most of their hiring for Corporate from outside the company, while
most are more likely to promote from within. There is often open
statements of distrust, expressions of frustration with the lack of
consideration from Corporate, and plain old gripe sessions on the AIMCO
Home Page discussion group section. It has amazed me that so few
Coporate employees seem to even read it or care that employees are upset
or disgruntled.
Opportunities certainly exist, but I think few have an interest. To be
a successful Corporate AIMCO employee, it seems you must be numbers
driven, be willing to compromise personal values and standards, and be a
master word-smith. Your word does not have to stand for anything, and
you must be willing and able to use people at a maximum level while
spending as little as possible. That does not work for me. I am a
people oriented manager who believes it is my responsibility to maximize
the Owner's profit by maintaining his asset to the best of my ability.
I believe we manage people and their homes to do that. I cannot
separate what I do from the effect it has on the people I serve. I
think AIMCO has dehumanized this business to a point they lose site of
the families we house. They also seem to have mastered the art
of "using up employees" and seeing them as expendable commodities or ,
simply tools.
The Human Resource Policies are fine, but not well communicated. It may
not be fair to judge the company for this so much as my RPM. Employees
are very upset that there have been no raises in over a year!
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