Community Manager

A Monday morning at this property might start with a rent roll review flagging three delinquent accounts, a call from the compliance department about an upcoming Management and Occupancy Review, and a maintenance supervisor waiting on your sign-off for a vendor quote. By noon, you're in a unit inspection. That's the rhythm here.

The Role

Fairstead owns and manages more than 30,000 apartments across 28 states, operating as an integrated owner and operator of affordable housing. This Community Manager position sits at one of their Cleveland properties and carries full accountability for day-to-day operations, site compliance, and financial performance.

The compliance side of this role is substantial. You'll work within HUD's 4350.3 Handbook requirements, coordinate with the internal Compliance Department on regulatory responses, and prepare the property for REAC reviews, Management and Occupancy Reviews, LIHTC reviews, and investor site visits. Annual and interim recertifications fall under your oversight as well. This is affordable housing with real regulatory depth, and the expectation is that you already understand how these processes work, not that you'll learn them on the job.

On the financial side, you'll monitor delinquency, pursue collections through legal channels when necessary, track bad-debt write-offs, and attend monthly budget review meetings. The operations side covers lease enforcement, eviction coordination, move-in and move-out logistics, vendor bidding, unit inspections, and bi-annual building walk-throughs with the Building Superintendent. You'll also stay connected to any active renovation or construction work on site, coordinating access and helping avoid violations during the process.

What Strong Candidates Bring

The hard requirements for this role reflect how compliance-intensive affordable housing management actually is:

• At least three years of team management experience in property management, hospitality, retail, or restaurant settings
• COS or CPO certification (non-negotiable given the HUD environment)
• EIV experience and working knowledge of affordable housing compliance
• TCS certification for tax credit properties
• Proficiency in Yardi and/or RealPage (preferred)
• Comfort in Microsoft Office and the ability to manage competing deadlines across compliance, operations, and finance
• A bachelor's degree is preferred but not required

What actually separates strong candidates in a role like this is the ability to hold the compliance and operational tracks simultaneously without letting either slip. Affordable housing managers who thrive tend to think about recertification timelines the same way a conventional manager thinks about lease expirations: proactively, with a calendar in hand. If you've managed a HUD or LIHTC property through an MOR or REAC inspection, that experience matters more here than general management tenure.

From a career standpoint, Community Managers who perform well in affordable housing compliance environments often advance to Regional Manager roles overseeing multiple affordable or mixed-portfolio assets, or move into compliance-focused positions at the corporate level. The HUD and LIHTC fluency you build here is genuinely transferable and remains in high demand as affordable housing development continues to scale nationally.