Community Manager

The Community Manager role at a Southeast-focused multifamily company carries real weight. You're not just running day-to-day operations at a single property. You're the person ownership, residents, and your own team all look to when performance slips, a lease-up stalls, or a vendor drops the ball. Hawthorne Residential Partners operates over 50 multifamily communities and has built a reputation around service culture, which means this position asks you to lead both the business and the people simultaneously.

What the Role Demands

This is a full-cycle community management position covering financial oversight, leasing, team leadership, and resident relations. You'll own the budget, track delinquency, manage deposit accounting, and pull reporting through Yardi. On the leasing side, you'll guide your team on traffic conversion, renewals, and pricing strategy to protect occupancy. You'll also jump in on tours and prospect follow-up when the volume calls for it.

Vendor management and property inspections are part of your weekly rhythm. So is partnering with maintenance on work orders and preventive care to protect curb appeal and reduce costly turns. You'll hold weekly team meetings, handle escalated resident concerns, and manage the community's online reputation by responding to reviews and keeping communication consistent with ownership and regional leadership.

The schedule runs Monday through Friday, 9 to 6, with Saturdays from 10 to 4, and one weekday off each week. Resident events and community needs can pull you in outside standard hours, so flexibility is part of the job.

What You Bring vs. What You Build Here

Hawthorne is looking for candidates with at least two years of multifamily experience, including time as a Leasing Consultant and Assistant Community Manager. Six months of direct community manager experience is strongly preferred. Yardi and Knock familiarity will make your first 90 days much smoother. A CAM, CAPS, or real estate license is a plus but not a hard requirement.

The skills this role builds are worth naming clearly. Managing a full P&L, coaching a mixed office and maintenance team, and owning occupancy outcomes develops the operational fluency that regional management requires. Hawthorne runs a formal Career Path Program with a stated goal of promoting community managers into regional roles, so this isn't a lateral move disguised as an opportunity. The infrastructure for growth is genuinely in place.

What Separates Strong Candidates

The managers who perform well in this type of role tend to share a few traits that go beyond the basics:

• They can read a T-12 and connect the numbers to operational decisions, not just report what's on the page
• They hold their teams accountable without losing the trust that makes daily coaching work
• They respond to a difficult resident situation with the same professionalism they'd bring to an ownership call
• They treat retention with the same urgency as new leasing, understanding that a renewal saved is a turn avoided

If you've grown through the leasing and assistant manager levels and you're ready to own the full operation, this is the kind of platform that rewards that progression with real commission upside and a clear path forward.