As distress in the multifamily market drives a wave of portfolio acquisitions, operators racing to add units face a hidden risk: operational consistency. Donicia Irizarry, Principal and Head of Property Operations at OneWall Communities, argues that when management companies scale too quickly, the systems that kept properties performing predictably often fracture, leaving each asset to operate on its own terms.
“When you scale rapidly, your operations are the first things to suffer,” Irizarry said. “And when your operations suffer, your properties start to operate independently. Then it becomes very difficult to monitor performance because it becomes so unpredictable.”
Irizarry, who holds CAPS, CAM, and CALP designations and is a CPM candidate, has seen the pattern repeat across the industry. Small operators rely on institutional knowledge held by individuals—regional managers who know every quirk of the portfolio, senior community managers who carry the playbook in their heads. That approach works until the portfolio doubles and those individuals can no longer hold it all together.
“All of that information is in their mind,” she explained. “They know how to do it because they fixed it before. They know the one, two, three of what needs to happen. But as you grow and scale, you need systems in place that take the thinking and the processes out of the people so it becomes part of your operational identity.”
The failure mode is predictable. Without standardized systems, each property begins operating independently. One community manager runs collections one way; another uses a completely different process. Maintenance workflows vary by site. Reporting becomes inconsistent, which means leadership makes portfolio-level decisions based on data that doesn’t compare cleanly across assets. For investors evaluating third-party management partners, the question isn’t just “how many units do you manage?” but “how standardized are your operations across every one of those units?”
OneWall Communities’ approach has been to build operational infrastructure that any new team member can step into and execute from day one. Irizarry has led the development of the firm’s learning management system and training frameworks from scratch, designed so that “anyone can fall in place within the given system, and know exactly what to do.” That includes configuring property management software to reflect standardized processes rather than leaving setup decisions to individual site teams. The software enforces the workflow; the workflow doesn’t depend on any one person remembering it.
Growth in third-party management is healthy, but the operators who will emerge from this cycle with defensible market positions are the ones who solved the consistency problem before it became a crisis. In a market full of portfolio acquisitions and management transitions, the ability to onboard a distressed asset and immediately plug it into a functioning operational system is the product. For more insights, visit onewallcommunities.com or call (646) 596-7068.
