So, as long as Im here, thats where the focus on the operations. So, we then realized that a lot of the reason was there was just not really a protocol of supporting the facilities team as its own function outside of the property, the leasing side of the house. What did Steven and his colleagues see, Willy wonders, that led to the shift? We offer positions as builders, designers, engineers, analysts, experience curators, and everything in between. A good example, we decided about five years or so ago we decided to let everybody know who worked on site, every community manager and service manager, that there is no amount of money that they are not licensed to spend to make a customer happy. Willy Walker: Thank you Susan and good morning everyone and welcome to another Walker Webcast. It is anchored in providing a beautiful yet affordable living environment and an enriched lifestyle to its residents. Don't get too excited about AUM, it's more important that we're delivering that service every day, and obviously I know it takes both but Im trying to get at a little bit of what's the focus? In general, I always feel appreciated, I always feel I can speak my mind, and I always feel like I am growing. Key Principal: Ashley Gordon See more contacts Industry: Apartment building operators. Cortland is a National Multifamily Housing Council top 50 owner and manager and is ranked as the top us brand by reputation.com. 270 S Watters Rd. We did it because that was the capital that was available. Allen, TX 75013-5259. They were all broken in some manner, and so, as you can imagine, they were extremely inconsistent from a product and location standpoint, and so you could not build a brand around this hodgepodge of assets. Frankly, historically, most people in the C suite of these businesses deign to get that operational stuff on their shoe. My controlling now the design of the materials, were talking everything inside the drywall in a unit. Our ability in markets where we have 20 or 30 assets in a given market, the way SEO and search works just having everything branded with a similar name really helps drive search straight to our website and straight to our product, our locations. We felt that was important because we did a lot of research before we did this and learned that our brand actually stood for high degree of service, customer living experience, a lot earlier in the cycle than we had anticipated. Get to know the Cortland businesses that build, design, and deliver the spaces we create. At least we were all one team. However, Steven hasnt considered expanding beyond housing. 2404-14 W. Cortland. Willy Walker: One of the things that you talked about standardization in the sense of the experience from a client standpoint. Cortland is the largest owner operator in Atlanta and Dallas as well as all of the State of Texas. A focus on stripping out costs to be vertically integrated to allow you to scale from 5,000 units up to today over 65,000 units. Brand and associated SEO realities in the market today drive traffic, and they tie into the customer-centrism of the business. Website. Welcome to the Apartment Owners Association of the Cortland NY Area! Our Services Affordable Senior Housing From apartments designed for independent living, to housing for seniors transitioning out of nursing homes, to cottages for the memory-impaired and their caregivers, our housing enables seniors to live, and age, where they choose. If you choose to do business with this business, please let the business know that you contacted BBB for a BBB Business Profile. Technologies. As it relates to the first part of your question, the fit and finish side and for our customers. So to your point looking at all the ships on the board, we didn't make the ships move any faster, but at least we now had consistent information about when they were going to get to the port in LA or the port in Florida. Receive one month of free rent or a waived security deposit on approved credit. Need to file a complaint? By 2011, we owned and managed 5,000 apartment homes and meaningfully accelerated our plans to build a company that could deliver unique value to both our residents and partners. In this episode of Driven by Insight, Willy interviews Steven DeFrancis, the founder and CEO of Cortland. That team, by the way, is now about 40 people and we're still always struggling to stay current to keep up. Cortland Design is our in-house, award-winning interior design and architecture firm. | Cortland is a product-to-people . We get an enormous amount of people who move from one city to the next and just call in straight through the office to find out what's available if they're moving from Atlanta to Dallas or Phoenix to Florida. And then, in the middle of September Im going to do my first live Walker Webcast interviewing with Eric Resnick CEO of KSL Partners to discuss the hospitality and leisure industries as KSL owns lots of hotels, resorts, and ski areas. Cortland Apartment Building and Tenant dispute. And then create a better living experience which would create more demand at our assets and eventually lead to better returns for our investors. But one of the things that you did Steven, is you brought on amazing talent in Ned and in David and others to really create this capital formation function inside of Cortland. We recently, by example rolled out a concept we call the Leasing Hub, which is instead of having leasing agents in every property who are fielding calls, inquiries from new customers, we centralize those folks. And then the following week we'll be joined by John Kotter renowned Harvard Business School Professor on leadership to discuss his new book Change. Pay Online. Say yes to a career you love. 2023, International Association of Better Business Bureaus, Inc., separately incorporated Better Business Bureau organizations in the US, Canada and Mexico and BBB Institute for Marketplace Trust, Inc. All rights reserved. Most of all, we got great consistency so when we were promising delivery dates on these units, we had much lower volatility than what we had seen previously, doing a more traditional model. . I do miss that piece. Need to find a different location? This was not the same type of profile we are working on today and, as you can imagine if you were an interior design professional getting the Cortland project to renovate a property that they had just paid $10,000 a unit to buy and we're going to spend $15,000 a year it wasn't the high glamour project. Cortland at the Hill. We are probably a 50 some odd people on the investment team, and they are spread out across the markets where we are operating in the US. So, I won't say we won't ever do something different, but we're not looking at something today. You've also standardized a lot as it relates to the if you will fit and finish of a Cortland property. So, we raised most of that capital in a preferred structure and we looked like geniuses at the end because the market went up so much, but we certainly didn't do it because we were smart. He is also a member of the Real Estate Roundtable, the Urban Land Institute, and the National Multifamily Housing Council. I continue to receive emails and texts about my discussion with James Kerr author of Legacy from two weeks ago. Fill out the form or view our office locations and phone numbers to get in contact with us today. It's just not something people want to deal with, but it's necessary. Contact Us. Choose the option that best fits your needs below and then let us know how we can help. BBB Business Profiles are provided solely to assist you in exercising your own best judgment. Im assuming you had to get market returns for your LPs, but your GP return dragged as you were investing in the business. This is a multi-location business. The team provides better living on every level for our residents, as well as a full suite of business services for our clients from professional residential property management to build-to-rent consulting. Willy Walker: As you think back over the last decade, take yourself back to 2010, the amount of scale that you've created, which is the along with scale success, the decisions you get to make today are very different decisions you made a decade ago. BBB Business Profiles may not be reproduced for sales or promotional purposes. We are one of the largest multifamily firms in the US, the Top Brand Performer for online reputation among property management companies(Reputation.com, 2022), and aGreat Place to Work-Certified Company(2022). Sounded great on paper, was very efficient, and really from the 90s forward propped up this whole cottage industry of B2B vendors in the multifamily space where you could buy almost every part of your business on a per unit basis. So, part of it is the intellect testing, that's more of the straightforward part, and part of it is the personality and making sure that we're getting folks with the right personality to meet the job that they're going to do. There's huge value in that and this is just one example where that scale just creates a ton of value. Cortland Headquarters and Locations - Learn more about Cortland's locations by map by and/or jobs. So, we got a great price, we got great product, we got great finish. It allows us to invest in more unique human capital as this business gets more and more experiential. That was a bit of a change for us, and I think a lot of folks in multifamily over this cycle. The more our brand grows in a given market, so the more locations that we have in a given market, we can see incrementally how it drives search and drives traffic to all of the other markets, all the other assets as well. Steven DeFrancis is the founder and CEO of Cortland. But there are few who've been able to create the capital formation capabilities that you have at Cortland. Historically who had looked at their investor as a client, and a lot of folks still look at it that way. Cortland South Mountain 7017 S Priest Dr, Tempe, AZ 85283 Visit Cortland South Mountain website ( 1) Special offer! So those two things kind of had to come together to create that better client experience. 51:39 - Will Cortlands main focus going forward be service or capital? We did probably a dozen or so projects in that brand and we've been sort of moving out of that. Cortland Build is a global, concept-to-completion construction delivery firm specializing in multifamily new build, commercial construction (amenities), and renovation. Since then, weve become a global, integrated multifamily investment, development, and management firm focused on delivering resident-centric, hospitality-driven apartment living experiences. The training that you've given them is sort of applicable across the Cortland platform. So, what we began to do is say okay let's take those learnings and really pivot the platform to focus on this new environment where the client or our customer needs to be at the center of everything we do. Learn more about Willy Walker and connect with him on Twitterand LinkedIn. 1160 Johnson Ferry Rd NE. Did you focus on that at all? Laramar is a national property management company offering apartments for rent nationwide. Five years ago, I knew every single person who worked here and could walk up and have a conversation and whatnot and knew them. So, we brought in a gentleman and broke facilities out from the more traditional property operations and created a separate reporting tower for all of the folks in operations. We felt then if that was the case, then the next piece was how could you build a system or a machine that could create a lot of throughput? Resale Documents. Cortland is a great company though the staff is at is worst iv witnessed racial slurs derogatory comments about residents they fine them for smoking when they vape in the office and smoke on property knowingly its a no smoking property. So, it barely moved the needle to go from really low grade to really high grade. Sincerely, Mary S. Community Manager. Since its founding in 2005, Cortland has expanded into a global, vertically-integrated multifamily real estate investment, development, and asset management company. He has looked at other product types within housing, and his main aim in each market is to achieve the desired asset base and scale. Browse jobs and read about the Cortland Dallas location with content posted anonymously by Cortland employees in Dallas, TX. Steven DeFrancis: Well, Ill tell you how it started. Over the last three years we've closed on 4% of the assets we've underwritten but, at the end of the day, if we take the learnings we're having through in our existing portfolio in each of these markets and the learnings we get from the 96% of the assets that we lose on, but we underwrote and got all the data from, and then maintain all of that in a dynamic database. Willy Walker: You talk about the people at Cortland, and Im privileged to know a lot of them, and Ive been to Mercedes Benz field to watch your team compete in a karaoke band competition, and that was actually quite something to watch. Steven DeFrancis: Sure, and you make a good point, especially back then. Steven and his team manage a portfolio of multifamily assets located in 11 states, primarily in the Southeast, Midwest, and Texas. Id like to think and Brad Brown, my acquisitions chief swears we've never paid more than somebody else for a property. Steven DeFrancis: Yes, it's been extremely helpful, and, in fact, since the pandemic, started March last year, we have delivered about 7,500 units to date. But Cortland really focused on that. This is an overview of the Cortland Dallas campus or office location. Steven DeFrancis: But, sometimes it's good to have more ambition and brains. 22:17 - Steven comments on Cortlands approach to brand and recruitment. In a market like Dallas or Atlanta or any of the markets were in, we don't need to be top one or five, but we'd like to have line of site to 4000 or 5000 plus units because it allows us to first, invest in better top notch human capital, because we have the scale to support it. Steven DeFrancis: I will never say Id rather leave here to go there, but I do miss the closeness. But I want to go back to 2010 when you owned, I think 1,200 units and had a whopping eight people inside of Cortland or just the next year when you'd actually grown dramatically from 1,200 units to 5,000 units. Printer Friendly View Address: 420 W Slaughter Ln Austin, TX, 78748-1692 United States . At that point coming out of the downturn, you are looking at between the 01 recession, the focus on the single family and then the GFC you are looking at over a decade of under development of multifamily. And began to build that team, which has been a great add to the organization. Let's back up a little bit too when you founded Cortland in 2005 as a small development firm focused on in-town development in in Atlanta and then during the great financial crisis changing from being a local developer to focusing on acquiring and renovating communities across the country. Our Company Our Company Our Story . We offer positions as builders, designers, engineers, analysts, experience curators, and everything in between. Willy Walker: So, your brand, your customer experience, and your cost of renovation, are all competitive advantages that allow Cortland to pay higher for an asset, lower your cost of rehab and then be able to make up for it in the rents, you can charge, because the combination of lower cost on the rehab and then also the brand on the rents allows you to have a unique competitive positioning as it relates to acquisitions. As a top 50 apartment owner and operator, Cortland has a brand and reputation of success and customer service. Cortland is the largest owner and operator in the cities of Atlanta and Dallas, as well as in the entire state of Texas. To everyone who listened in today, I hope you enjoyed our discussion and I look forward to seeing everyone back next Wednesday on another version of the Walker Webcast. Where others see a square foot, we see a story. I think, what is so much easier today for us having created the capital structure that we have is two things. 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