Stop maintaining a beautifully renovated community, and it will return to baseline in eighteen months.
Entropy is the tendency of every system to drift toward disorder without a continuous input of energy. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. Add energy, and you hold order. Stop, and the system degrades. Multifamily properties and teams are not exempt.
In multifamily operations, this is literal. Withdraw leadership attention and the property degrades.
Three years since anyone touched the once renovated lobby. The leasing process still runs on whatever the last manager left behind. Nobody has reinforced the service standard at an all-hands in memory. All of it is entropy doing its work.
Maintaining a standard takes exactly as much energy as building one. If you think your culture, your process, or your standards will hold themselves together without continuous investment, you’re arguing with physics.
Three years. Beautiful at month one. By month eighteen it started to look like every other property in the submarket. Nobody decided to let it decline. They stopped adding energy. Add the energy. Every day. The alternative is physics.
Your property is either being actively maintained or it’s declining. No stable middle state. Energy in, or entropy wins. — Mike Brewer
Discussion prompt: Where in your operation has entropy made the most progress in the last twelve months, and what specific, recurring energy input would reverse it?