As distressed multifamily assets flood the market and property management firms rapidly absorb portfolios, the first thing to break isn't financial—it's operational consistency. Donicia Irizarry, Principal and Head of Property Operations at OneWall Communities, warns that when a management company scales too fast, the institutional knowledge that once lived inside key individuals becomes a liability.
“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 observed this pattern repeat across the industry. In small companies, the regional manager knows every quirk of the portfolio, and the senior community manager carries the playbook in their head. It works—until the portfolio doubles. “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.”
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, meaning leadership makes portfolio-level decisions based on data that doesn’t compare cleanly across assets. For investors evaluating third-party management partners, this is where due diligence often falls short. 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 enforce standardized workflows rather than leaving setup decisions to individual site teams.
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 isn’t a feature—it’s the product.
