Mary Kahl | Senior Vice President of Property Management, Timberland Partners
Mary joined Timberland Partners in 2009 as a regional vice president. Since that time, she has been instrumental in guiding our operations team. Mary’s strategic vision is focused on how we serve our three customer groups: the residents who choose to call our communities home, the team members who keep each property running efficiently, and the partners who have trusted us with their investments.
How do you feel the resident experience is different at Timberland Partners compared to other multifamily apartment communities?
I’ve been in the industry a long time and have listened to many customer concerns over the years. We always try to look for what we can do for our residents. We can’t always satisfy every request that comes in, but nobody wants to be told what we can’t do for them or the corporate policy. So, we try to train our team members to talk about what we can do versus what we can’t, and that feels better at the end of the day, and our residents walk away feeling much more satisfied.
Why would someone choose to live at a Timberland Partners community?
I think somebody would choose to live at one of our properties for many reasons. First, we offer a lot of flexibility with our lease terms. We offer the ability to move from one Timberland property to the other with little hassle. In our changing environment, people move from state to state, company to company, and they don’t have to go through that entire process again of looking for a new home and applying. We can help direct them to one of the states that we operate within.
I think when you’re at our properties, we have people that care. We have resources for residents if something is not going right. Our door is always open. We don’t just bounce things back to a community manager if things aren’t going well. We do want to hear our residents. We do want to know what they’re concerned about, and we do want to take care of any issues.
Why does the property management team focus on making every property truly feel like a community?
I think people are looking to be part of something more than just the four walls that they live within. They want to know who their neighbor is, and they don’t want to go outside and all over town, especially over the last year, to find those activities and those relationships. We work hard on having events and different things that will engage them in their communities and with their neighbors.
What role do Timberland Partners’ vision, mission and guiding principles play in day-to-day decision-making?
We have vision, mission, and guiding principles and we start all of our meetings talking about that. Our team members know it, and we live up to that. You know, it’s kind of the nail that we hang our hat on at the end of the day. It’s who we are, and we try to instill those values into our managers for the times when they’re having to make tough decisions — because they make decisions all day long and there’s not always somebody there to help them. The big things that go wrong typically happen in the middle of the night and we want to be sure that they have a foundation that they can turn to and say, ‘This is the right thing to do.’ That’s exactly what our vision, mission, and guiding principles do, they say, ‘This is our purpose. This is what we’re about,’ and we work toward that.
