The Outliers of Fair Housing

Fair Housing is pretty clear cut for the most part.  Federal and state laws clearly list the protected classes and outline the ways in which they are to be protected.  There are however, outliers: situations in which doing the right thing isn’t always clear and when it is easy to make a mistake and violate Fair Housing laws.  Most often it is just not realizing someone is a member of a protected class or fully understanding the situation.  Let’s take a tour of some of the less common, but altogether more difficult situations in Fair Housing.

How great leasing turned into a charge of discrimination

Don't panic. The title of this post is indeed scary, but the lesson is simple and quite valuable. Let's dive into this cautionary tale of how zealous leasing without the minutiae of procedural details landed a community in a conciliation agreement with HUD.

Get In The Game!

The NCAA Final Four games get underway this weekend. Across the country people are pumped up and ready for the action. Basketball fans are excited! But have you ever noticed that during championship tournament time, in any sport, fans seem to come out of the woodwork?

Leap Year Logic

2012 is a leap year, and with that comes the always mystical, often underutilized leap day. The leap day: 24 hours that just materialize out of thin air…miraculous! 

 Ok, so it isn’t actually miraculous. It takes 365 days and 6 hours for our planet to rotate around the sun. The leap year was created to keep our calendar in sync with the planet’s rotation. Despite the scientific explanation, it’s understandable that an event that occurs only once every four years will feel special, even magical. After all, even someone who lives 100 years will only see 25 leap days!  

Turning Chaos into Calm

The controlled chaos of many leasing offices is often indicative of some common problems that can easily be corrected. Often, these issues go unchecked because all of the problem-solving effort goes towards fixing resident issues, not internal operations.

Tick Tock, Look Back Before Looking Forward

Prior to calendars like the Gregorian or Julian, the seasons and equinoxes marked time. Time was more of a rolling event, without clear boundaries from one year to the next. Thanks to the structure of our calendar, we have an obvious beginning of each year on January 1st and an obvious end on December 31st. 

Follow-Up Techniques is Now Live!

Our latest course offering, Follow-Up Techniques, is now live and ready to assist leasing teams in learning the basics, overcoming challenges and power of great follow-up!  

Five More Tips for Regional Managers

We did a post a while back entitled the Top Five Tips for Regional Managers (http://blog.gracehill.com/ghexchange/2010/11/top-five-tips-for-regional-managers.html).  It went over well, and it is time to follow up with another five helpful ideas for the road warriors of our industry, those Regional and District Managers.

Trial by Fire

Multifamily professionals are like those in any other industry—time and experience are required for true expertise. Regardless of position or aspiration, experience is second to none when it comes to just “getting it.” The more you work, the better you get at your job. It’s as simple as that.

A Few of Our Favorite Things

Bringing knowledge to your desktop has got to be one of the finest features of the Internet. Filtering through all that information to separate the junk from the genius can be daunting at times, but there are some sites that consistently put out phenomenal content. So here are a few of our favorite websites for you to check out.

Grace Hill OnAir with Nadeen Green - You Really Want To Watch This One!