ACE Awards

My Property Manager nominated me for the ACE Awards, which stands for Apartment Community Excellence. I was a tad surprised considering that I basically do just enough to keep my apartments full, my property clean, and my residents happy. I am a bit anal with paperwork so that in turn makes the corporate office people happy too. But I definitely don't do anything extra or go above and beyond. But apparently that makes my PM happy and he felt I deserved a nomination for this award. I think it's pretty awesome.

Someone once said to me that the only people who manage apartments are either elderly people who didn't plan properly for retirement, white trash, or young married couples (usually LDS, which is kind of funny) who are trying to finish school. I am assuming that that last category is where I fall. But in those other two categories there are some people who have made managing apartments their career, so they can go all out sometimes. Thus, I didn't think I would actually win the award because I have not made this my career or anything. I am just doing this to get free rent and make some money while being able to stay at home with Porter until Jeff finishes school. I just happened to luck out and be working for an awesome company (here's my plug for C&R Real Estate Services) who actually cares about their residents and employees and not only about money. I also have a pretty awesome Property Manager who values my opinion and trusts me to do my job, thus he leaves me alone to run my property the way I feel it needs to be run. Everyone, especially the owner (who I haven't met yet by the way. As long as he is making money off this property he is happy, thus he doesn't try to get all involved, which by previous experience just messes things up anyway) is just happy when I keep the property full - which is actually pretty easy because the property is cute and the prices are good. I also have some sweet perks with my job - free rent in a good size HOUSE (yup, not an apartment), extra income each month, a backyard, a garage, utilities paid, and I got to choose my own hours which is only four hours a day Monday thru Friday, plus some stuff here and there on Saturdays, but not very often. I work from home so I still get to be with Porter all day long, which I love. Seriously, this is the best job.

So for this award I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork where I explain why I feel I was nominated and why I am totally awesome (hello, isn't it obvious, ha ha), turn in a letter of recommendation (thanks to Katie Hendrickson for the kind words), then I got interviewed. When they announced the winners it was during a nice dinner that was at the Convention Center. I was pretty stoked to go to a nice dinner with Jeff, without Porter, and not be paying for it. When we got there they had programs on the tables which had all of the people nominated in each category. I open it up and unfortunately the category that I am in (Manager of the Year, 50-100 units) is the absolute biggest category - yup, my original thoughts that I wouldn't win had just been confirmed. So, I of course didn't win, but I still thought that it was pretty cool that I was nominated. This is an industry award for this whole area, so there were a ton of people there. Here's some pics from the dinner that was last Wednesday night, 5/21.

We were in the front on the very far left corner, so you can't see how big the room was - it is actually a bigger deal in the industry than I thought, so there were a lot of people there.

This is Peter Hay, my Property Manager. I've got to say, he is the absolute best PM to have. My PM at the last place I worked totally micromanaged (due largely in part to the owner, who was an absolute JERK) and was always in my face requiring me to do a ton of useless crap, thus making my life hell. So, it will be a sad day if Peter ever leaves the company.