Hiring for property management: staff, pay and grow your PM company

Start from the work that is slipping, not from the org chart.

A maintenance backlog that keeps aging past its promise date points at the maintenance bench.

Leads that wait days for a callback point at leasing.

Owners or board members who learn about problems from their own residents point at management.

The roles fall into four groups.

• On-site management: the property manager who runs a community's budget, staff and resident outcomes; an assistant property manager; a resident manager who lives on site. The property-type specialists sit here too — community association managers for HOA and condo boards, affordable-housing managers for LIHTC and HUD properties, and student-housing and senior-living managers.
• Leasing and office: leasing agents who tour and follow up; leasing managers who lead the leasing team; community assistants, which is a student-housing role; property administrators and property accountants in the back office; and compliance specialists who keep affordable-housing files audit-ready.
• Maintenance and building staff: maintenance technicians who carry the work-order load, make-ready technicians who turn units, porters, maintenance supervisors, and the building-side roles — superintendent, building engineer, facilities manager and doorman.
• Multi-site oversight: regional and portfolio managers, commercial property managers, asset managers, and a director of property management once the portfolio outgrows one-on-one oversight.

Two checks come before the posting.

First, licensing: whether the person must hold a real estate license is set by the state where the property sits, not by the job title.

Exemptions turn on the person's duties and employer.

Confirm the specific role with the state real estate commission before you write the ad.

Second, credentials versus licenses.

IREM's CPM itself is not a license — IREM requires CPM graduates to hold an active real estate license only where one is required for their position in their state.

The same holds across the credential alphabet: the credential pages we read describe NAA's CAM and CALP, CAMICB's CMCA and IREM's ARM as voluntary industry credentials, not licenses.

Treat them as preferred qualifications, never as the license itself.

Our research found no published staffing standard that fits every property.

The ratios that circulate online — units per technician, doors per manager — are not something our research could confirm from a primary source, and they ignore your property age, amenities and layout.

Size the team from your own workload instead: open work orders and the labor hours behind them, turn volume, leasing traffic, after-hours coverage and how scattered the buildings are.

The published reference point our research did confirm is NAA's.

The association's staffing best-practices paper calls "one office staff and one maintenance staff per 100 units" the age-old general rule for on-site staffing — NAA's own rule of thumb, not a standard.

The same paper reports NAA's 2019 survey of operating income and expenses — 2018 data, stabilized communities of 50 or more units — averaged 45.3 units per full-time employee.

It also suggests a 40-unit property needs at minimum one part-time office staffer and one part-time maintenance staffer, possibly shared with a sister community.

For scale, NAA Education Institute describes the average apartment community as 254 units employing at least six onsite staff.

Two timing notes from the staffing paper: lease-up staffing can run from six months to two years depending on property size and time to stabilization.

The paper also recommends establishing a relationship with a local staffing agency that can supply temporary employees as needed — for extended absences or time-limited projects.

Anchor to published data first, then adjust for your market and the duties you actually need.

All three anchors below are national cross-industry medians from the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program.

• Property, real estate and community association managers (SOC 11-9141, the combined payroll occupation for on-site managers — it never covers owners): a median annual wage of $69,990 ($33.65 an hour).
• General maintenance and repair workers (SOC 49-9071, the closest series for apartment maintenance technicians): a median of $49,590 ($23.84 an hour), with a 10th percentile of $35,350 and a 90th percentile of $77,180.
• Leasing agents have no BLS occupation of their own. The closest available group is counter and rental clerks (SOC 41-2021 — BLS maps "apartment rental clerk" there, and O*NET lists "leasing consultant" as a reported title): a median of $41,300 ($19.86 an hour). Treat it as a proxy, not as leasing agent pay.

Then the pay rules that shape an offer.

If you salary a manager under the federal white-collar exemptions, the 2026 salary level is $684 a week, and the salary alone is not enough.

The duties tests must be met too.

For the executive exemption, they require a primary duty of managing the enterprise or a recognized department.

The executive exemption also requires customarily and regularly directing the work of two or more employees, and either authority to hire and fire or recommendations on those decisions given particular weight.

Non-management maintenance and trades workers cannot reach exempt status through the highly-compensated-employee test no matter how highly paid.

Free or discounted housing cannot be counted toward the exempt salary.

State law can raise the floor.

California sets exempt salaries at no less than two times the state minimum wage for full-time employment — $70,304 a year for 2026, at the $16.90 statewide minimum wage.

Bonus and tool policies carry their own rules.

Nondiscretionary bonuses — retention, attendance and per-lease production bonuses announced to drive work — must be included in the regular rate when you calculate overtime.

If you require technicians to supply their own tools, the FLSA is violated in any workweek the cost cuts into required minimum or overtime wages.

Confirm the structure with the DOL Wage and Hour Division or employment counsel before you roll it out.

Post where the ad can tell the whole truth about the job: property type and unit count, the real schedule including weekend and on-call rotations, pay, the license or credential expectation phrased as your state requires, and any housing benefit described plainly.

A posting that hides the schedule or the pay collects applicants it never intended to interview.

Some states require the posting itself to carry the pay.

Among them, California and Washington require employers with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale or salary range in each job posting, and Washington adds a general description of benefits.

New York requires the compensation or a range (and the job description, if one exists) when advertising a job performed at least partly in New York at four or more employees, and commission-only roles may state that pay is commission-based.

Colorado requires each job opportunity notice to disclose the hourly or salary pay or range in good faith, a general description of benefits, and the date the application window is expected to close.

Confirm the current rules with the labor agency in each state where you hire before you post.

Sourcing changes on covered affordable work.

HUD's Section 3 rule (24 CFR part 75) applies to public housing financial assistance and to HUD-assisted housing rehabilitation and construction projects with more than $200,000 of HUD assistance — $100,000 for lead-hazard grants — and it does not reach ordinary private market-rate properties.

On covered projects, the safe-harbor benchmarks are 25 percent of labor hours by Section 3 workers and 5 percent by Targeted Section 3 workers, ratios HUD kept unchanged in a benchmark notice effective November 4, 2026.

When you are ready to list, post the job on PropertyManagerHires — a board that lists only property management work, so leasing, maintenance and management candidates are not wading through other industries to find it.

It is worth seeing the candidate's side before you write the ad: browse maintenance technician listings the way a job seeker does.

A background check you buy from a screening company is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and the FCRA scripts the sequence.

Before you order it, the applicant gets a clear and conspicuous written disclosure that stands alone — a document consisting solely of that disclosure — and gives written authorization.

If you might reject the applicant based in whole or in part on the report, a pre-adverse action notice comes first, with a copy of the report and a copy of "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act."

The final adverse action notice follows the decision.

It must include the consumer reporting agency's name, address and phone number, plus a statement that the agency did not make the decision.

Federal law sets no fixed waiting period between the two notices; build a workable window with your counsel, because some city and state laws add steps and timelines of their own.

On what the report can count for, the EEOC's enforcement guidance on arrest and conviction records — still published on the agency's site as of October 2026 — says an arrest alone does not establish criminal conduct.

Its model is a targeted screen that weighs the nature of the offense, the time elapsed and the nature of the job, followed by an individualized assessment.

Fair-chance timing is jurisdictional, so name the place before you build the application.

California's Fair Chance Act bars employers with five or more employees from asking about or considering conviction history until after a conditional offer.

New York City requires criminal-history questions to wait until after a conditional offer, then a written Fair Chance Process before an offer can be withdrawn.

Washington's trigger is different again: an employer may not ask about, or obtain through a background check, an applicant's criminal record until after initially determining the applicant is otherwise qualified for the position.

Drug testing runs through state law too.

California bars penalizing applicants or employees for off-duty cannabis use or for a test finding nonpsychoactive cannabis metabolites, and bars asking applicants about prior cannabis use — while its protections do not extend to impairment or on-the-job use.

If you hire across states, build the policy state by state with counsel.

And if you use skills tests or scored selection, the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (29 CFR part 1607), adopted by the EEOC, the Civil Service Commission, the DOL and the DOJ, govern those procedures.

Onboarding paperwork has federal deadlines.

Form I-9: the employee completes Section 1 by the first day of work.

The employer completes Section 2 within three business days of the hire.

Each form is retained for three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later.

E-Verify, the free DHS and Social Security Administration system, checks the I-9 information against government records to confirm employment eligibility.

Employers covered by Title VII, the ADA and GINA must also keep application forms and other hiring records for one year from the date the record was made or the personnel action was taken, whichever is later, under 29 CFR 1602.14.

Some states add new-hire notices.

California requires a written wage notice at the time of hiring.

New York requires a written pay notice in English and the employee's primary language, including the pay rate and any allowances claimed — which matters when you hire live-on-site staff, because a lodging allowance you claim must appear on it.

Training is where property management differs from other hourly workforces.

Under HUD's rule at 24 CFR 100.7, an owner or management company is vicariously liable for a discriminatory housing practice by its agent or employee whether or not it knew or should have known of the conduct.

It is also directly liable for failing to take prompt action to correct and end discrimination it knew or should have known about.

The federal Fair Housing Act's seven protected classes — race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin and handicap (disability) — are the floor your leasing conversations touch every day.

No federal rule imposes a general fair housing training mandate on private staff as far as our research found; the requirements that do exist are state licensee rules and program-specific ones, so treat training as your liability control under 100.7.

Where licensee rules do apply: California requires its real estate licensees to complete a three-hour fair housing course plus a two-hour implicit bias course as part of 45 hours of continuing education each four-year renewal.

New York requires its real estate licensees to complete 22.5 hours of continuing education every two years, including at least three hours on fair housing and/or discrimination and at least two hours of cultural competency.

California separately requires sexual harassment prevention training at employers with five or more employees — at least two hours for supervisors and one hour for nonsupervisory employees.

Retention runs on the same numbers as hiring.

The closest federal series is BLS's JOLTS program for real estate and rental and leasing (NAICS 53 — an industry line that also includes car and equipment rental and brokerages, so read it as context rather than a property-management rate).

In 2025, quits in the industry averaged 1.6 percent a month, against 2.0 for total nonfarm.

Total separations averaged 2.6 percent a month, hires averaged 2.6 percent, and the job openings rate averaged 4.6 percent.

What our research found no published benchmark for is what a departure costs you.

Property-management-specific figures for turnover cost or time-to-fill are not something our research could confirm, so measure with your own payroll and scheduling data.

The law does shape the retention tools: nondiscretionary retention bonuses belong in the regular rate for overtime.

On-call time counts as working time when the employee must stay on or near the property and cannot use it for their own purposes.

A live-in employee is not working every hour on site if a reasonable agreement on hours considers all the facts.

Confirm the design with the Wage and Hour Division or employment counsel.

New hires expose whatever the firm never put in order, so work through the entity list before the job list.

• The firm's own license. In Texas, a business entity may not act as a broker unless it holds its own license and designates one of its managing officers as its broker. It must also carry errors-and-omissions insurance of at least $1 million per occurrence if the designated broker owns less than 10 percent of the entity. Rules differ elsewhere — confirm your entity's licensing with the state real estate commission before you staff up.
• Trust accounting. Handling owner and resident funds brings the broker trust rules with it. California requires brokers to deposit funds held for others — funds not placed in a neutral escrow and not given to the principal — into a trust fund account with a bank or recognized depository in California. Florida requires entrusted money to be placed immediately in escrow with a Florida title company, bank, credit union or savings and loan, and makes failure a disciplinary ground.
• Classification. Decide employee versus independent contractor worker by worker. At the federal level, DOL's 2024 independent-contractor rule remains on the books, but the Department says it is no longer applying it in investigations; the replacement it proposed on February 26, 2026 had drawn no final rule as of early October 2026. Separately, IRC section 3508 treats qualified real estate agents as statutory non-employees for federal tax purposes when the statutory conditions are met — a tax category, not a blanket classification answer.
• Housing for live-on-site staff. Lodging is excluded from an employee's income only if all three tests are met: it is on the business premises, it is for the employer's convenience, and it is required as a condition of employment. If the employee could take extra cash instead of the lodging, the exclusion fails. A plain rent discount for staff who do not meet those tests is generally taxable wages. Have a CPA review the arrangement before you promise the apartment.
• Growth thresholds. Averaging 50 or more full-time employees, including full-time equivalents, in the preceding calendar year makes the company an applicable large employer under the ACA's employer shared-responsibility provisions. Hiring across state lines also means learning state exceptions — Montana, for example, is not fully at-will: after an employer's probationary period, a discharge without good cause is wrongful under the state's Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act.

Employer information, not legal, tax or licensing advice. Confirm licensing questions with your state real estate commission, wage-hour and screening questions with the DOL, the EEOC or your employment counsel, fair housing questions with HUD, and tax questions with a CPA.