Talking Business

Canyon Pacific: Property Management with a Surfer’s Soul |

by Emily Landes

For Tom Scripps, president and founder of Canyon Pacific Management, successful property management is as simple as following the rules. There are rules that tenants must follow and rules that owners and property managers have to follow—as long as everyone follows those rules, things will move smoothly. Surprisingly, tenants are not the ones who have the hardest time figuring this out, says Scripps. �Over time, most of the tenants come to trust the management company because we are consistent. We just want them to adhere to the rules, just like we do. We want tenants who know what those rules are, and will obey them. The ones that don’t, end up leaving their apartments for one reason or another,� he contends.

But Scripps is often faced with the problem of owners who are too caught up in trying to be friends with their tenants; they don’t enforce the rules and end up letting their tenants walk all over them. “Many owners are so lacksidaisical. There’s very little room for that. You’ve got to run it almost militarily. It has to be structured in a way where the tenant knows where you’re coming from and then it doesn’t necessarily have to be adversarial,” he says. “I’m okay being the bad guy as long as I do it nicely and fairly. And all those rules are set up right in the rent control laws.”

It may come as some surprise that Scripps’s passion for by-the-book property management is more than matched by his love of a sport without much of a rule book to speak of: surfing. The La Jolla native has been up on a board since he was 12 and continues to surf twice a week, often on his lunch break, at Ocean Beach. While he most often surfs locally, he has gone as far as Fiji and an even more remote island chain that took two days and a 14-hour boat trip to visit.

When asked how he reconciles his rule-loving self with his wild surfer self, Scripps had a simple answer: the two sides help keep him balanced. “Surfing is about as removed as I can be from this particular spot,” he said, motioning to his lively SoMa office. “It’s like black and white, but I love them both.”

One reason that Scripps feels passionately about both his job and his extracurricular interests is that they share the bond of camaraderie. Just as he surfs with a regular cadre of fellow wave enthusiasts, he works with a growing team of 25 loyal employees, including 8 to 10 in the office, 12 maintenance workers, and several supervisors and on-site property managers.

A desire to be a part of a team is actually one of the reasons that Scripps stopped working as a �lone ranger� developer and shifted his focus to management, starting Canyon Pacific in 1991. Scripps had been managing his own buildings in the Bay Area since 1980, which he still does today, but in the early 1990s he decided the time was right to make property management a priority. The real-estate market was heading south and �big and small developers were dying on the vine,� he says. “Everyone in the business was falling apart. How did you get paid? No one was buying anything. So, I thought, management! They’ll pay me for management! I’m gonna do that.”

Over his long career owning and managing rental property, Scripps said most of the market conditions have remained the same. “A nice apartment in 1980 was hard to get and it’s the same now,” he claims. But a few things have changed, like a better quality of tenant overall and, subsequently, more of an emphasis on upgrading the units when they turn over. “When somebody moves out, owners want that unit pristine because they want the best, highest rents,” he says. His maintenance staff is able to handle major renovations that include marble countertops and high-end appliances. One Marina owner spends about $40,000 each time one of his units is vacated. To Scripps, these renovations make a lot of sense in a rent-controlled city where tenants can stay for decades, leaving few opportunities for large-scale changes to the unit. Especially with today’s competitive rental market, there is little motivation for long-term tenants to move.

That’s why Scripps relies on his on-site property managers to make sure that these tenants remain happy, unproblematic and obedient. “An on-site manager is worth his or her weight in gold,” he says. His property managers can help determine if a long-time tenant is involved in an illegal sublet, mediate disputes between tenants and even handle some light maintenance. They come into the Canyon Pacific office weekly to discuss which tenants are acting suspiciously and the next course of action to take.

Of course, not every building has an on-site property manager, and in those cases Scripps relies on “friendly” tenants in the buildings to let him know what’s going on in the units. In one case, a tenant in SoMa helped the company evict another tenant who was throwing giant for-profit parties in his apartment. The helpful tenant, who was being driven crazy by the constant late night noise from this unit, found out the date of an upcoming party and where it was being advertised—information Scripps passed on to an equally friendly police officer, who busted the tenant for the illegal party.

But Scripps emphasizes that most of the time, once tenants understand the rules, these kinds of enforcement measures are rarely needed. In one crime- and drug-infested apartment building in the Tenderloin, Scripps put a nightly security guard at the front gate, made tenants and guests check in before going up to the units and instigated the arrest of a problem tenant. Thereafter, most of the tenants either accepted the new order or decided to move to another building with less scrutiny of their activities. “People try less and less to get away with things if you have the proper control over them,” he says. “It’s like herding schoolchildren off to the school bus. You’ve got to watch them. It’s the same in any building, high end or low end, they’re all going to need a little policing now and then.”

In between policing tenants, running a company, managing his own properties, and spending time with his wife and three adult daughters, Scripps still manages to find time to leave the rule book behind and catch a few waves. “I love surfing because there’s no rules, no boundaries,” he explains. “It’s all up to you to figure out what to do.”

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine and Rental Housing magazine. Copyright � 2007 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.