talking business
Vaulted Knowledge
by Emily Landes
At the beginning of every California Certified Residential Manager series, instructor Craig Waddle asks his class one simple question: “How many of you, when you were six years old, dreamed that you’d grow up to be property managers?” In the many years Waddle has been teaching for SFAA, he’s never had a single person raise their hand.
In this respect, Waddle is very similar to his students. Even though his parents were cattle ranchers in East Texas who rented out parcels of their land, Waddle never imagined he’d one day be managing his own “parcels” all over San Francisco. He began on the property management path by sticking closely to the family business model, managing agricultural properties in Carpenteria. While there, he had the opportunity to take on a very different family business: Santa Claus Lane, a Santa-themed village right off the 101. Waddle’s aunt owned the strip, which included a candy shop and a petting zoo with penguins, complete with a real igloo made by a local ice company every day. The lane also had a fine dining restaurant, where Waddle continued to work even after his aunt sold it in the 1980s. One day, he was injured on the job; he could no longer work in the restaurant industry, so the state determined that it would reeducate him in a new line of work. He wasn’t allowed to work for himself, but other than that, the bureaucrats left it up to him: what did he want to be?
At the time, what Waddle really wanted to do was get into real estate. When friends in San Francisco wrote a letter saying they would hire him as the broker of record for their mortgage company, the state agreed to pay the bill for his broker’s license. While working there, Waddle came to the attention of Betty Taisch, who was determined to convert him into a property manager. From the start, Waddle wasn’t interested. Taisch seemed to work all hours of the day and night; even his meetings with her would take place at 10 p.m. at her Noe Valley office. Then there was another small issue: “I knew nothing about property management. I didn’t even know there was such a career called property management,” he admits.
But eventually Taisch’s persistence paid off, and he ended up working for her property management company for over a decade. He went on to help start Property Management Systems with SFAA board member Michelle Horneff-Cohen. Horneff-Cohen taught the CCRM class and enjoyed it, so when SFAA asked Waddle to teach a fair housing class, he figured he’d give it a shot.
Immediately, Waddle knew that he had found his calling. From his very first class, he was hooked on the rush of teaching. “It’s fun to be the person who shows them how to do this right, how to streamline the process, how to dot all the i’s and cross the t’s, and at the end of the day go home with the warm and fuzzy feeling that you’ve done the best possible job,” he explains.
Waddle quickly moved on to teaching the entire CCRM series, but he still has a particular soft spot for the fair-housing material. This often-tricky subject is Waddle’s favorite precisely because it’s so easy to get into a lot of trouble, usually with the best of intentions. “In the blink of an eye you can do the wrong thing that comes back to haunt you months later,” he says. Waddle recalls a claim made against one of his agents who offended a disabled woman in a wheelchair by opening a door for her. The claim was eventually dismissed, but it taught Waddle that any differential behavior, even if the agent is just trying to be helpful, could be considered discriminatory.
These life lessons are part of what makes Waddle an effective teacher, says SFAA
Education Director Vanessa Khaleel. “Craig has so many years of onsite property management experience, he is able to bring real-life experiences into the classroom,” she says. “When I managed property, it was so nice to be able to ask questions or bounce ideas off someone who knew how hard the job was. San Francisco rent law isn’t black and white; one mistake can cost owners a lot of money.”
Just ask any property manager who has been slapped with a fair housing claim simply for answering a prospective resident’s question about the “safety” of a particular area or building. While the manager or leasing agent can mention specific attributes of a building, like a video surveillance system or gated entry, the caller should be directed to a nonemergency police department phone number for real statistics about crime in the area, Waddle cautions. The same is true if a caller wants to know where to find, say, a predominantly Cantonese-speaking community. The agent should tell them to seek out Census data for facts, rather than give an opinion and be accused of “steering.” “We get into trouble, more often than not, trying to help and giving out too much information,” he counsels.
Don’t residents get frustrated when agents refer them elsewhere for the answer to what they consider a simple question? Typically, no, says Waddle. The secret is all in the delivery. “I always tell the people in my class that one of the biggest functions of our job is telling people to go to hell and having them look forward to the trip,” he laughs. “That’s all in finesse, explaining to them not just the what, but the why.”
In fact, he adds, a large component of property management is telling people what they can’t do: “No, we’re not going to give an early security deposit distribution; no, you can’t move your stuff in a few days before the rental agreement starts; no, you can’t have five dogs, a horse and a small monkey in your unit. We have to be able to tell folks no and keep them compliant to the rental agreement that they’ve signed without sounding like a textbook; explaining it in a friendly, human kind of a way is something that comes with experience.”
That’s why, as much as the CCRM class is helpful and educational, Waddle believes it should be a supplement to, not a replacement for, real-world experience. If two applicants with limited experience came to him for a job, and one had taken and passed CCRM and the other had not, he’d choose the one with the CCRM designation. But between an experienced property manager without CCRM certification and an inexperienced one with the designation, Waddle would have to choose the former—and then, no matter how experienced, he’d have the new employee sign up for the next series. “One of my favorite things about CCRM is that it’s not theory—it’s application. It’s what a lot of the folks in the class are already doing, but it fine tunes what they’re doing and gives them a great overview of California law,” he praises.
In fact, Waddle is such a proponent for the power of education that last year he decided to leave his post at Trinity Properties (where he had been the general manager for about five years) and focus on teaching. He spent almost a year teaching classes for SFAA and acting as a professional witness for landlord-tenant cases, before the siren of property management called again.
This time, it took the form of Vanguard Properties CEO James Nunemacher. For years, Nunemacher had wanted an in-house property management division and, just this past spring, Waddle agreed to start up the department. He says that the combination of high-end properties and conscientious owners was too good to pass up. The fact that all the properties were built after 1979 doesn’t hurt either. “I may be the only fee manager in San Francisco that’s able to make a living managing nonrent controlled apartment buildings,” he exlaims.
Just because Waddle doesn’t have to worry about rent control anymore doesn’t mean he’s forgotten all those owners still stuck in the trenches. He continues to teach CCRM, as well as other courses for SFAA, and says he can’t imagine a time when he won’t be standing in front of a classroom.
Likewise, SFAA can’t imagine its classes without Waddle. Khaleel says Waddle consistently receives the highest marks from his students’ course satisfaction surveys, both because of his wealth of property management knowledge and his buoyant sense of humor. “SFAA is lucky to have instructors like Craig,” she says. “He is loyal to our industry and makes learning fun.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine. Copyright © 2009 by Black Point Press. All rights reserved.