From Legacy to Relevance: NARPM’s Crossroads
Why the NARPM 2.0 Reforms Aren’t Enough and What It Will Take to Secure the Future of Property Management’s Most Important Organization
I don’t talk much about my views of NARPM anymore. I’m obviously a supporter, as I’ve advocated for membership in this publication many times, but I stopped trying to reform the organization a while ago. I came to realize that NARPM National is structured in a way that actively resists meaningful reform from anyone outside the hand-picked Board. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring. And right now, with the rollout of what they’re calling “NARPM 2.0,” change is (supposedly) underway.
If you read Peter Lohmann’s newsletter (and you should), you probably read in the recent issue that NARPM’s CEO, Gail Phillips, is retiring after decades running NARPM. In addition to this, the organization is currently going through a transition they’re calling “NARPM 2.0.,” which is a reworking of how the Board of Directors is structured, how support is provided to local chapters, etc. So with all of this happening in NARPM world right now, I figured it was time for me to talk about the upcoming changes that I’m aware of, the parts I agree and disagree with, and the other things that I think NARPM needs to do to stay relevant in the industry.
NOTE: I’m sure I don’t need to say this, but since this article could be a little controversial, I want to emphasize that what I write represents my own views only, and advertisers/sponsors/partners don’t even know what I’m writing about ahead of time, so my views obviously don’t necessarily reflect their views. This is always the case, but wanted to emphasize it here since our sponsors are also NARPM Affiliates and very active in the NARPM community.
NARPM 2.0
In my view, NARPM 2.0 is a mixed bag. These are the things I currently know about what is changing with NARPM 2.0:
Regional Vice Presidents are being eliminated and replaced with general Directors on the Board who are not from or responsible for individual regions
The “election” process has been changed so that the Nominating Committee is now tasked with selecting candidates for positions based on specific qualifying criteria and skill sets (for example, the Treasurer should have some knowledge of finance and accounting)
The NARPM staff will be more responsible going forward with assisting local and state chapters rather than this being in the hands of volunteer RVPs
Remote Team Members are being provided to chapters to assist with the administrative tasks of running a chapter (this is something that has had a slow roll-out on a smaller scale for the last couple of years)
Those are the only things I know that are public knowledge about NARPM 2.0, but my understanding is that there is more. So let’s talk about what we do know.
Replacing RVPs with Directors is a smart move. For starters, as you may have noticed, RVPs have only sometimes even been from the regions that they’re responsible for. For example, I’m in the Southeast Region, and our RVP is from the Pacific Northwest. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense (even though I happen to really like our current RVP). If the Board members aren’t even going to be from the different regions, then we might as well not even consider them RVPs. Moving to a general Director model makes more sense. It is also fantastic that these Board members will no longer have the responsibility of overseeing these regions. If you’ve ever talked to an RVP about what their role entails, you know that it’s a bunch of meaningless reports collected from the region’s chapters. This is not something that a Board member should be doing. Passing this off to staff and RTMs makes a lot more sense.
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I also like that there is a new focus on NARPM staff and RTM involvement overall. Many of you know that before I was in property management, I was not only an airline pilot, but also a national officer in the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), the largest labor union for pilots on earth. So I have more than a bit of experience in running large non-profits (ALPA is around 16 times the size of NARPM in terms of membership, and 85 times in terms of revenue). At ALPA, we relied heavily upon paid full-time staff. Pilot volunteers and officers decided the direction of the national organization, but staff largely carried out that direction so that we weren’t having to do the day-to-day grind on a lot of things. NARPM needs to move more towards this model. Obviously with only $4 million in revenue as opposed to ALPA’s $340 million, NARPM will not be able to have nearly the same support structure, but NARPM’s needs are also vastly less than ALPA’s where we had to represent 80,000 members in two countries across dozens of airlines. NARPM is generating a surplus year after year despite very low dues and conference attendance fees, plus assets on hand are well into the seven figures, so the resources are there to make managing this organization much easier on the volunteer members. So this is a very good step, and I hope it continues to expand.
Now let’s talk about the bad. I have been a long-time opponent of NARPM’s “election” system. I put that word in quotes because NARPM’s system of electing national officers is akin to a Saddam Hussein sham election (for the younger crowd, Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iraq before we overthrew him, and he used to hold fake elections where he would receive 99.96% of the vote with 99.47% participating; those are the actual reported numbers from his government in the 1995 election, not an exaggeration on my part). NARPM’s “elections” essentially follow the exact same path. You don’t get to pick from candidates. NARPM National decides for you who the “slate” of candidates is going to be for every position, and your only “vote” is to approve what they already did. Theoretically, you can write in a candidate, but the process is so opaque and restrictive that no one could realistically win. So the members just get force-fed whoever the Nominating Committee (a secret committee whose members are not even published on the NARPM website) decides to cram down our throats in their infinite secret wisdom. As a result, if you talk to the average member who even pays attention to any of this charade at all, the perception is that Gail hand-picks candidates and always has exactly the Board she wants. Now, I don’t necessarily believe that, as I think Gail has gotten way too much ire over the years and has actually done a pretty damned good job, but the system itself is just inevitably going to lead to those sorts of conspiracy theories. You can’t have a secret committee and no real election and expect people not to dream up conspiracies about it. If for no other reason than to avoid the appearance of impropriety, the system should change.
The problem is that NARPM 2.0 only works around the margins on this issue. The only real change (at least that I’m aware of) is the introduction of the screening criteria for the various positions. The “election” system itself will remain the same. The Board members I’ve spoken to defend this system by claiming “other non-profits do it the same way!” Yeah, so? That’s not an argument, it’s a deflection. Or more accurately, it’s a logical fallacy called an “appeal to common practice” or “argumentum ad populum.” The reason this is categorized as a logical fallacy is that just because something is common doesn’t mean that it’s right, effective, or ethical. In 1955 everyone was smoking on airplanes, but I don’t think that’s a good defense for keeping the practice going and continuing to kill people with second-hand smoke in perpetuity. You need to defend your policy on its merits, not simply on the basis that other organizations are running the same terrible policy. And yet, this is the ONLY defense I’ve heard from the Board, and I’ve spoken to several current Board members about this. In the past, former NARPM President Eric Wetherington who previously led a task force looking at the election structure, also made the argument to me that the system is designed to make sure that the organization’s mission is carried out rather than being subverted by whoever is popular. And as someone who hates populism, I definitely understand his point, but “we know what’s best for you” is never a very good argument. There are ways to mitigate the popularity contest concern without completely eliminating a bottom-up structure.
So while some qualifying criteria for certain positions are certainly an improvement of a sorts, it’s just lipstick on a very ugly pig when it comes to this entire appointment process overall (I won’t even bother calling it an election process).
A Better Way to Choose Leaders
What I have long advocated for (until giving up a couple of years ago) is a completely overhauled system that involved actual elections. And I believe my proposal addresses Eric’s concerns and prevents it from becoming a pure popularity contest. Full disclosure, this proposal is not my brilliant idea. I’m just borrowing it from my old gig at ALPA. This is basically how we did elections.
Leaders of local chapters should be directly nominated and elected by the members of those chapters. We have already switched to this model in the Atlanta chapter where I’m President this year. We’re now on our second year of running elections this way. The members nominate people for each position, and whichever two candidates get the most nominations are on the election ballot. Then the members vote on those two candidates for each position.
From there, the elected leaders of the local chapters should be responsible for electing the national officers and directors. Essentially, it’s a very American system: representative government. You elect your local representatives, and then they go to National to vote on your behalf. This addresses Eric’s concern of a giant popularity contest, because the elected representatives who work within the NARPM structure know it well and know who will be a good fit for these positions. At the same time, they’re directly responsible to the local members who elected them, so it isn’t some anonymous, secret, hand-picked committee making those decisions for them. And there should be multiple candidates for these positions who need to make their case for why they’re the best person for the job, and those cases should be made public so that the members can provide feedback to their local reps before voting takes place.
State chapters, to be honest, I really don’t care much about. NARPM has done such a poor job of creating a bottom-up organization that state chapters are rare, and well-functioning ones even more rare. We either need to get rid of them or completely overhaul them. For now, allowing the local chapter elected reps to elect the state reps makes the most sense to me.
Candidates should actually campaign. You should be required to have actual ideas instead of just being a seat filler who got the job because you didn’t cause any waves. Sometimes we need some waves. We need bold new ideas and someone to push them. NARPM is stagnant and struggling to maintain relevance in an age of IMN conferences, virtually unlimited webinars from various sources, Facebook groups, software user conferences, and groups like Crane that are effectively competing with NARPM. Stagnancy will be considered the golden age if we don’t do something soon to change things. I foresee NARPM shrinking over the coming decade unless real change occurs, and that worries me to no end as NARPM is our ONLY method of fighting back against government overreach in our industry. Crane isn’t going to hire a lobbyist to push our legislative priorities. IMN isn’t going to have a PAC to support pro-PM politicians and get our voice heard in the halls of power. This is the domain of NARPM, and we need to ensure that it stays around to protect our interests.
Dues Structure: Why NARPM is Stuck
Beyond simply fixing the appointment process for NARPM leaders, we need broader change. I mentioned how weak the state chapter structure is already. Florida landlord/tenant attorney Harry Heist has argued for years that NARPM needs to restructure as more of a bottom-up organization, with money flowing from local to state to national, instead of everything going into National and then trickling down. Top-down simply doesn’t work. The reason we can’t get more state and local chapters built and growing is that when someone pays NARPM dues, none of the money goes directly to their local or state chapter (if one even exists). Instead, the money goes to NARPM National, and local and state chapters are left to largely fend for themselves. National does provide a token amount of financial support with things like a member retention bonus and some various grants for specific things, but the money is miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Local and state chapters effectively have to finance themselves. At the Atlanta chapter, we mainly fund our operations through our Southern States Conference, which produces a substantial surplus every year. But not every chapter can have a large conference to fund operations.
What Harry Heist suggests is basically the Realtor model of funding the organization. It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of the NAR, but I do like their dues model. Effectively, everything is bottom-up. When you become a Realtor, you don’t directly pay NAR, you pay your local Association. The local association gets the full dues payment from you, and then they apportion it. Example:
$1,000 total annual dues:
$300 local dues
$299 MLS membership
$200 state dues
$156 national dues
$45 NAR Advertising Assessment
This makes absolutely certain that local and state associations are funded FIRST, which inevitably leads to a stronger national organization. The problem with NARPM is that everything is top-down. So when a local chapter wants to start up, they have to find a way to fund themselves while starting out with virtually no members. How do you grow membership while not having anything to offer because you don’t have any funding to offer anything? As a result, new chapters almost never start up, and when they do, they usually fail or limp along barely surviving for years. The number of strong chapters in NARPM can pretty much be counted on your fingers, no toes necessary.
I propose a change to NARPM dues in the NAR model as follows:
$500 total annual dues:
$150 local dues
$100 state dues (and create state chapters for every state)
$50 Advocacy Fund contribution
$200 national dues
Yes, this is a dues increase. But it comes with a much more robust structure that will fund a vibrant local and state chapter network. My best guess is that NARPM would more than double in size within the first five years of doing something like this. And I think that’s a very conservative estimate. The thing holding NARPM back is its structure. There is somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 residential property management companies in this country. That means there is somewhere around 700,000 people who qualify for NARPM membership in this country. And how many members does NARPM have? Just 5,000. That’s less than 1% of the people who qualify for membership. By contrast, about 50% of all real estate licensees in the country (including property managers, funnily enough) are members of NAR. And many of the other half are engaged in other businesses not relevant to NAR, such as commercial sales and management, appraisal, and property management. So NAR’s market penetration is incredible. Essentially if you actively represent buyers and sellers of residential real estate in America, it is almost universally true that you will be a member of NAR. They have specifically engineered it this way by making their local and state chapters so strong, combined with those associations having ownership of the MLSs in many states.
NARPM obviously doesn’t have the power of the MLS, but I would note that the MLS is overstated as the primary cause for such high NAR membership. For evidence of this, I would point you to my own state of Georgia where the largest MLS is GA MLS, a private organization not owned or controlled by the Realtor associations. FMLS is another large MLS in the state, primarily for north of Atlanta, one of the largest markets, and it also is a private organization. Only small towns like Albany, Columbus, and Valdosta have Realtor-owned MLSs in Georgia. The vast majority of agents in this state have absolutely no need to be Realtors to access the MLS. And yet, virtually every single active licensed agent is a member. I think that is a testament to the structure and effectiveness of the local and state associations, using a bottom-up funding model rather than a top-down model. Strong local chapters aren’t just nice to have; they’re the engine of membership growth, event attendance, and long-term engagement.
Advocacy, Not Education, Is NARPM’s Future
The other major change I would make is focusing on government affairs as NARPM’s primary purpose. NARPM has long existed as a networking and educational organization for property managers, but the cold hard reality well into the 21st century is that NARPM isn’t needed for this purpose, and its educational and networking offerings are frequently criticized as being subpar. With so many sources nowadays for industry information and education (including right here at PMAssist with our Insider and Founders subscriptions as well as this newsletter), NARPM no longer has a monopoly on this and can’t rely upon it to drive membership. Instead, we need to focus NARPM on what only NARPM is able to provide: government advocacy. And not just on the national level, but on the state and local level. Our profession is being systematically targeted by people like Phil Weiser, Attorney General of Colorado. NARPM isn’t even the main opponent to Weiser and the other lawmakers in the state looking to gut property rights and PM businesses. Instead, it’s the Colorado Landlord Legislative Coalition (CLLC). And while CLLC was founded by some amazing NARPM members like Lyle Haas, it is NOT a NARPM organization. Why have we ceded this responsibility to independent, unaffiliated organizations?
The vast majority of NARPM resources should be devoted to government affairs. I know that makes some people’s eyes glaze over who don’t particularly like politics, but it’s simply a reality of our current predicament. Our profession is under constant attack. Even in very landlord-friendly states like my own, we are still having to fight back bad legislation on a regular basis. We should be dumping money into these fights. NARPM National should be taking its surpluses and using them to fund lobbying in states like Colorado, Nevada, Illinois, Washington, etc. where the “tenant’s rights” zealots are on the march. Because the crazy ideas that start in these places have a tendency to spread everywhere else also. A fight in Colorado is not just a fight for Colorado PMs, it’s a fight for all of us.
To be clear, I’m not saying that we get rid of education and networking within NARPM. I think those things are still incredibly important, especially for newer members. But I am saying that our primary focus needs to be on government affairs.
Join NARPM
With all of my complaints and criticisms, you might be shocked that I constantly advocate for NARPM membership for every property manager. But as I said in another article, NARPM doesn’t have to be perfect to be a damned good organization. NARPM is a community, and while I think its priorities need to be reworked and its structure completely revamped, it is still a damned good community for all of us. If you aren’t a member, you need to join. Now. Click the link. Do it. It’s dirt cheap. Far cheaper than it should be. Join now before I manage to convince them to raise the dues. And once you’re a member, if you agree with my analysis here, make your voice heard to the Board about the changes that you think need to be made. Even appointed board members are somewhat accountable to the members, and if they hear enough complaints, they’ll make changes. Be part of the solution, and be part of the community.
Thank You to Gail
I think we should all thank Gail Phillips for keeping NARPM stable and useful for thousands of members over the past 20 years. She has always taken a lot of heat, including from yours truly, and she’s always taken it in stride. While it’s time for a new generation to come in and perhaps make some big changes, the organization is only in a position where that can happen because of her many years of hard work and dedication. I hope she enjoys a fantastic retirement and we continue to see her face at NARPM events in the years to come.
Programming Note
Our usual paid PMAssist Insider article that normally comes out on Wednesday will likely be coming out later in the week. I’ll be on the road Wednesday and Thursday giving a presentation to the Jacksonville NARPM chapter, so the schedule this week is a little wonky.
We’re Hiring!
My property management company is looking for another BDM! If you have PM experience, and you either live in Atlanta or are willing to move here, please send me a resume. The position offers a combination of salary and per-door commission (with a heavy emphasis on commission), so we’re looking for go-getters who will put in the work to close leads. You would start off with 40+ leads from day one, so plenty of opportunity. Georgia real estate license required, or must be willing to get it prior to starting. If interested, email me a copy of your resume to toddo@revolutionrm.com
Open to Work
Are you an experienced PM industry employee looking for work? Or are you a PM company or vendor seeking the best talent? Send me your info and I’ll feature it here! And look forward to future editions where we’ll be featuring some of the best RTMs available!
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Debate Me
Disagree with my take here? Have a different perspective? There’s nothing I love more than a good debate or even just an intelligent conversation. If you’d like to jump on a podcast recording with me to discuss this topic, please let me know!
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