Assistant Community Manager

Skills at the Center of This Role

The Assistant Community Manager position at Mezza Premier Apartments draws on three skill sets almost simultaneously: leasing, financial administration, and team leadership. On any given day, you might walk a prospect through a tour in the morning, spend the afternoon reviewing ledgers for billing accuracy, and close out the day de-escalating a resident concern before the office closes. That range is real, and it's what makes this role genuinely useful for building a well-rounded property management career.

Hawthorne Residential Partners ranks among the top 50 multifamily management companies nationally and has concentrated its portfolio in the Southeast, where they've developed a recognizable operational culture called "Live It." At Mezza Premier, that translates to an expectation that the assistant manager carries that culture into every resident interaction, not just during events but in routine conversations about renewals, payment plans, and maintenance follow-up.

What You'll Be Doing, Through a Skills Lens

Your leasing skills get used consistently here. You'll conduct tours, respond to incoming leads, guide applications through to completion, and actively support renewal efforts to protect occupancy. Social media content creation for the community is also part of the leasing function, used to drive traffic and highlight resident engagement.

On the financial side, you'll need to be comfortable with rent collection workflows, including payment posting and check scanning, as well as monitoring delinquency and making follow-up calls. Ledger reviews are a regular part of the job, and you'll assist with financial reporting that goes to both the Community Manager and regional leadership. Comfort reading a basic financial report and flagging discrepancies is genuinely useful here, not optional.

Leadership skill comes into play whenever the Community Manager is out. You step into that continuity role, keep the team moving, and maintain the resident experience without a gap. That expectation is baked into the position, which is part of why prior assistant manager experience is preferred alongside at least two years in property management overall.

• Two years of property management experience preferred
• Six months in an assistant community manager role preferred
• High school diploma or GED required
• Valid driver's license required
• CALP designation is a plus
• Weekend availability required (Saturdays, 10 AM to 4 PM); schedule is 40 hours weekly with one weekday off

What Makes This Opportunity Specific to Hawthorne

Hawthorne's Career Path Program is a real differentiator for candidates thinking past this role. The assistant manager position is the standard entry point into the Community Manager track, and the company's Learning and Development team is structured to support that progression internally. If you've been in leasing or admin roles and want a defined path toward running your own community, that structure is already in place here.

Compensation for this role includes hourly pay plus monthly leasing and renewal commissions and quarterly performance bonuses. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) with match, paid time off (including your birthday), paid parental and adoption leave, pet insurance, telehealth access, and company-paid life insurance.

Jacksonville's multifamily market has seen continued demand pressure in the north corridor, where Mezza Premier sits near the I-295 beltway. Communities in that submarket compete on amenity presentation and resident retention as much as on rent, which makes the leasing and relationship-management skills in this role particularly relevant to day-to-day performance outcomes.