Community Manager

The community manager role has always been the hardest job in multifamily to hire for and the easiest to underestimate. You're running a small business: P&L accountability, a mixed team of leasing and maintenance staff, resident relations, vendor oversight, and ownership reporting, all at once. Hawthorne Residential Partners is looking for someone to do exactly that at Hawthorne at Whitehall, a community in the South Charlotte market along the 28209 corridor.

What This Role Actually Covers

Financially, you own the property's performance. That means reading and acting on your T-12, managing delinquency, handling deposit accounting at move-out, and making pricing and concession calls that hold occupancy without bleeding NOI. Yardi is the system of record here, with Knock layered in for lead management, so comfort with both platforms matters from day one.

On the leasing side, this isn't a position where you hand tours off and forget about traffic. You're expected to stay close to the leasing process, support your team through it, and personally step in when needed. Renewals, lease accuracy, and retention strategy all sit with you. Social media management for the community is also part of the job, which at this point is just standard for any community manager position worth taking seriously.

The maintenance side of the role is coordination and oversight: partnering with your maintenance team on work orders and preventative care, managing vendor relationships, and keeping curb appeal and common areas at a standard that holds up under resident scrutiny and ownership walkthroughs alike.

Team leadership here means real coaching. Weekly meetings, performance accountability, hiring, training, and the harder work of building a culture where both office and maintenance staff actually function as one team. Hawthorne has a stated internal career path program, which means your development work with your staff has somewhere to go.

What Hawthorne Is Looking For

• At least two years of multifamily experience, with time as both a leasing consultant and assistant community manager
• Six months of experience in the community manager seat, highly preferred
• Yardi, Knock, and Microsoft Office proficiency, also highly preferred
• CAM, CAPS, a real estate license, or a property management license strengthens your application
• Valid driver's license required
• High school diploma or GED equivalent

The schedule runs Monday through Friday with a standard leasing office window, plus Saturdays from 10 to 4. One weekday off keeps it at 40 hours, though resident events and community needs will occasionally pull you outside those hours. That's honest and worth knowing going in.

Compensation includes base salary plus monthly leasing and renewal commissions and quarterly performance bonuses. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401k match, paid time off including your birthday, pet insurance, paid parental and adoption leave, telehealth access, and company-paid life insurance.

What separates a strong candidate here from an average one is financial fluency paired with genuine people management skill. A lot of managers can read a variance report or run a resident event. Fewer can do both, hold a team accountable with consistency, and still have enough credibility with ownership to have a real conversation about budget. That combination is what this role requires.