Hunter Crane Career Background
What is your biggest career achievement?
- In all my past experiences as a young marketing professional, no achievement has proven to be greater than the one found at DTN Management through the opportunity of being a global educator for marketing foundations & processes of a 275+ person team. For any rental housing marketer, they will understand the benefits & learning opportunities of positively reinforcing marketing principles when collaborating with stakeholders in all departments of an organization. In doing this, it has allowed me to refine my personal workflow processes to be able to handle a higher-output load compared to previously expected turnaround times.
Specifically, evaluating & refining my personal processes through cross-functional collaboration has given me the ability to increase personal output to the tune of 1,100 total completed projects by bringing more projects in-house while saving the company 66% in overall costs. While saving money for the company and on-site management teams, I also managed to expedite turnaround times for project completion from a standard expectation of 2-week delivery to an averaged 72-hr completion.
What is your ultimate career goal within the rental housing industry?
- Landing my current role as a Marketing Coordinator marked off the first step of a personal development plan that I created in high school to ultimately become a full-time real estate investor with the capital ability to invest in whichever projects proved to be the most viable within the industry in the long-run. As such, reaching the last step of the plan would mean that I’d be following a path towards becoming a principal or partner of an already-established RE Investment Firm through traditional methods of career growth and/or launching a firm from the ground-up. Regardless, the day-to-day duties between the two options would remain the same – Largely focused on long-term business development & nurturing the overall growth of the organization. Being involved within the real estate industry has proven to provide a sense of evergreen growth. As such, steady growth would be the foundation for any & all strategies created while in the role as a principal/partner for a RE firm to allow the ability to properly scale the organization without overleveraging itself.
What's one rental housing trend you have your eye on?
- Throughout my career, I’ve consistently been a fan of the philosophy presented within Occam’s Razor – “No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary”. In essence, the philosophy presents the idea that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. In terms of rental housing, this quote can become relevant rather quickly as rental companies’ total unit counts begin to rise (as does their YTD payroll costs). Traditional methods of staffing for multi-family housing state that for every 100 units, there must be 1 FT office employee & 1 FT maintenance employee. However, this method could pose issues as total properties increase with varying unit counts that don’t allow for such clean arithmetic to calculate required staff.
What if a company could consolidate groups of managed properties into “zones” with a primary office to be designated as the centralized hub for the group? In doing this, a company could effectively spread staffing labor over the “zone” which would result in significant payroll cost-savings as well as a much more efficient transfer of information due to correspondence at each property reaching one central hub of staff. Instead of billing a single property 40 hours for a FT office employee’s time, the property could then split the labor amongst three other properties to effectively pay only 25% of the original payroll cost while achieving similar output levels.
This centralized zone concept would be an extremely beneficial method to undertake for any rental housing company that intends on scaling its portfolio in the coming years. DTN Management Co. has managed this concept for years which has consistently allowed us to focus on high employee availability after move-in by way of personalized experiences & exceptional service to ultimately improve community retention in the long-term.