Most companies treat culture like a breakroom snack—nice to have but not essential.
They’re wrong.
Flat wrong.
Grossly negligent, by my estimation.
Culture isn’t a perk.
It’s the product.
It’s what you sell to your team before they sell anything to fellow team members, residents, and supplier partners.
Multifamily leaders obsess over occupancy rates, renewal percentages, and NOI.
But none of those numbers move without a culture that drives them.
A toxic culture costs more than vacancies.
It drains innovation, burns out top performers, and turns your team into order-takers instead of experience-makers.
If your leasing agents sound uninspired, your maintenance team feels invisible, or your leadership turnover is too high, your culture is costing you.
The best teams don’t stick around for paychecks alone.
They stay for energy, mission, and the feeling that what they do matters.
If your culture doesn’t make them feel like owners, you’re just renting their talent.
Culture isn’t opulent offices, executive lounges, inane and embellished stories told a thousand times over, Ferarris, private planes, or birthday parties to be paid for by self.
I always thought that the last one was the height of silliness.
It’s how decisions get made when no one is watching.
It’s whether your team believes leadership has their back.
It’s whether they feel enriched when they put on the company name.
You can’t buy culture.
You have to build it.
And if you’re not intentional, the wrong culture will build itself.
A high-performing multifamily company isn’t in the property business.
It’s in the people business.
Many a leader forgets this after they make their bag.
Treat culture like the product it is, and the numbers will take care of themselves.
“You don’t build culture with words. You build it with decisions.” – Mike Brewer