How to hire a community manager: where to find, how to screen and what to pay

A community manager is the on-site lead of a large apartment community — the person accountable for occupancy, renewals, collections, expenses against the budget, the condition of the asset and the resident experience.

The team underneath is the distinguishing feature of the title. When you post this role, you are hiring a leader of people: someone who can direct an assistant manager, leasing consultants and maintenance technicians and still own the numbers personally.

The National Apartment Association Education Institute (NAAEI) describes the average apartment community as 254 units with at least six onsite staff — a community manager, assistant manager, leasing consultants and maintenance technicians among them. Use that as a picture of the staffing model the title sits on top of, not as a sizing rule for your property.

Day to day, the work spans leasing and renewal oversight, collections and delinquency follow-up, expense control against the budget, and vendor and contract administration.

It also reaches further into the asset than a leasing desk job: coordinating turns and capital work with the maintenance supervisor, resolving resident escalations, and reporting results up to a regional or portfolio manager.

In an owner-operator or REIT setting, a community manager may report into a regional or portfolio structure. In a third-party firm they also carry owner reporting and the scope set by each management agreement.

Keep the title straight against your org chart. A community manager at a conventional apartment community is a different job from a community association manager. The association manager answers to an HOA or condominium board rather than to the ownership of rental units — a different employer, a different pot of money and a different compliance picture.

You need the seat filled when the community has outgrown what a leasing manager and a maintenance supervisor can coordinate between themselves: nobody owns the budget narrative, staffing decisions wait, and the regional gets surprises instead of reports.

Whether one manager can cover your community — or several — is a sizing question of its own. Our staffing context page walks through how on-site teams scale with property size.

For the texture of the work from the candidate's side, our what a community manager does career guide covers the role in depth; this page stays on the employer's side of the hire.

Start inside your own portfolio. An assistant community manager or assistant property manager already knows your systems, your standards and your residents, and promoting from within keeps that knowledge in-house.

Transfers between communities you operate work the same way, and they give the incoming manager a fresh start with a team that has no history with them.

When you look outside, target people already close to the seat: assistant managers ready for the top job, leasing managers who want the full operating results, and community managers at smaller properties looking for a bigger team and a larger asset.

Post where the audience is property management people: a board that lists only property management work, apartment association job boards, and the general boards for reach.

Referrals are quieter but useful. Your maintenance technicians meet managers at the properties they service, and your vendors know which communities run on organized management.

Remember that sitting managers screen you while you screen them. A posting that names the team they would run, the unit count, the reporting line, the on-call terms, any housing benefit and a real pay range gives a candidate far more to act on than a vague one.

When you are ready to post, our hiring hub collects the employer guides on this site, and you can post your community manager role on a board that lists only property management work.

Screen for evidence, not adjectives. Ask the candidate to walk you through the numbers they personally owned at their last community — where occupancy, renewals, collections and expenses stood, what they did about them, and what moved.

Then press on the team, because that is the heart of this title. Who reported to them, how they coached a leasing consultant who was missing goals, how they ran the on-call rotation with their maintenance supervisor, and what they did when a hire was not working out.

If your pricing comes from a revenue-management system, screen for how they operate inside it: how they implemented pricing recommendations, how they handled renewal pricing exceptions, and how they escalated a recommendation they believed was wrong. You are looking for disciplined execution through the proper channel, not freelancing.

On resident experience, look for systems rather than slogans: how they tracked satisfaction and review trends, how they recovered a service failure, and what they changed that residents actually noticed.

Ask about turns and capital work too. A capable community manager can describe the make-ready pipeline at turn season, how they prioritized a capital request against the budget, and how they got vendor bids approved and invoices checked.

Screen fair housing judgment with scenarios, not slogans: the same criteria applied to every applicant, an accommodation request routed through company policy, and documentation kept without being asked. The stakes are the company's — 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 of the conduct.

Finally, systems fluency. Ask them to open a report they built themselves — a rent roll, a delinquency report, a budget variance — in the platform they ran daily, whether that is Yardi, RealPage, AppFolio or a smaller system. Fluency shows in seconds; a recited feature list does not.

A community manager hire carries a wide compliance surface — pay-disclosure laws, selection-procedure rules, the FCRA and state fair-chance timing — so run it as a defined process. The sequence below is a practical default, not a legal opinion: confirm the legal steps with your state agencies and counsel.

1. Write the posting. Name the property type, unit count, team, reporting line, schedule, on-call terms, any housing benefit, and the pay range. California and Washington require the pay scale in the posting at 15 or more employees, and Washington's posting must also carry a general description of benefits. New York requires the compensation or a range in an advertisement for a job performed at least partly in New York when you employ four or more, and a commission-only role may say exactly that. Colorado requires each posting to disclose pay or a range in good faith, describe benefits generally, and give the date the application window is expected to close. Posting rules keep changing state by state, so confirm the current requirement with your state labor department.
2. Screen against the actual job. Sort resumes by the demands of this community — asset class, systems, team size, reporting line — not by title polish.
3. Interview to a structure. Ask every candidate the same core set and score answers against the screening criteria above. If you use tests or scored exercises, the federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures govern selection procedures, so keep every exercise job-related and scored the same way for everyone.
4. Make finalists show work. A budget variance narrative they wrote, a renewal plan for a soft community, or a turn-season staffing schedule tells you more than a third round of interviews.
5. Check references upward. Talk to the regional or owner they reported to, not just peers, and ask what your screening criteria care about: collections, renewals, staffing and owner communication.
6. Run the background check lawfully. Under the FCRA, a report you buy from a screening company is a consumer report, and the rules attach before you order it. First give a clear, conspicuous written disclosure that consists solely of that disclosure — no waivers or extra terms on the same page — and get the applicant's written authorization, which may sit on the same document. If anything in the report might cost the candidate the offer, send the pre-adverse action notice first: a copy of the report and a written description of their FCRA rights. The FTC's employer guidance says to include a copy of the report with that notice. It also directs you to include "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act." Only then take the adverse action, and follow it with a notice that names the screening company, its address and phone number, and the fact that it did not make the decision. The FCRA sets no fixed waiting period between the two notices, so build a reasonable review window into your timeline instead.
7. Handle criminal history carefully. EEOC's enforcement guidance on arrest and conviction records, still in effect at our October 2026 review, treats an arrest alone as insufficient. Its targeted screen weighs the nature of the offense, the time elapsed and the nature of the job, followed by an individualized assessment. Timing is local: California bars employers with five or more employees from asking about conviction history until after a conditional offer. New York City requires the same conditional-offer timing and adds its own Fair Chance Process before a withdrawal. Washington instead bars criminal-history questions and checks until the applicant is initially determined otherwise qualified. Other states and cities may set their own timing rules, so check the rules where you operate.
8. Keep the records. Employers covered by Title VII, the ADA and GINA must keep applications and other hiring records for at least one year from the later of when the record was made or the personnel action taken.
9. Close the offer in writing. Put the pay, schedule, on-call terms, housing and benefits, and how performance will be reviewed into the offer letter, and set the first-year expectations while enthusiasm is high.

Anchor on the federal wage data first, and read the label that comes with it. BLS tracks one occupation — property, real estate and community association managers (SOC 11-9141) — and community managers share that series with property managers and community association managers.

In the May 2025 OEWS survey the occupation earned a median of $69,990 a year ($33.65 an hour) across all industries.

The middle half earns between $50,720 (25th percentile) and $97,910 (75th percentile). The full national distribution runs from $41,010 at the 10th percentile to $139,680 at the 90th, with a mean of $83,710 across 311,180 payroll jobs.

Two labels matter before you budget. OEWS counts payroll employees only, so self-employed owners' income is not in these figures. And the one series covers every manager title, so treat it as context for your thinking rather than a community-manager-specific number.

For the state and metro tables, our community manager salary data page carries the full BLS breakdown. Use your own market's row rather than the national one, and adjust for asset class and the size of the team the role runs.

Then decide how the salary sits against overtime law. The federal FLSA white-collar tests require a salary basis, a salary level and duties that fit an exemption. The salary level in force in 2026 is $684 a week ($35,568 a year). A federal court vacated the 2024 rule that would have raised it, and the DOL republished the prior thresholds in a final rule dated May 15, 2026.

The duties must carry it too, and this is where the community manager role should help you. The executive exemption expects managing the enterprise or a recognized department, customarily and regularly directing two or more employees, and authority to hire or fire, or hiring-and-firing recommendations given particular weight — so the team-leading substance of the job needs to be real and documented, not just in the posting. The administrative exemption is the alternative: office or non-manual work tied to running the business, with discretion and independent judgment on matters of significance.

Two traps catch employers on this classification. Free or discounted housing never counts toward the salary test — the level is measured exclusive of board, lodging or other facilities — which matters when a unit comes with the job. And the highly compensated employee route ($107,432 in total annual compensation, including at least $684 a week on a salary or fee basis) never covers non-management maintenance and trades staff, however highly paid — worth remembering for the technicians your manager leads.

States stack their own floors on top. California sets its exempt salary at no less than two times the state minimum wage — $16.90 an hour from January 1, 2026, which works out to $70,304 a year. Confirm your state's current threshold with its labor agency before you classify anyone.

Structure incentives around the results you screened for — renewals, collections, occupancy and budget. If your manager is non-exempt, nondiscretionary bonuses must be folded into the regular rate for overtime weeks, and a bonus does not become discretionary just because the plan calls it that. Have employment counsel or the DOL's Wage and Hour Division confirm classification before you commit to a structure.

Start from the fact that there is no national answer. Whether a community manager needs a real estate license to lease or manage for others — and who is exempt — is set state by state, and exemptions turn on duties, pay and who the person works for, never on the job title.

Texas shows the pattern. Its licensing law treats leasing or negotiating leases of real estate for another, for consideration, as brokerage activity, and a business entity acting as a broker must hold its own license with a designated broker among its managing officers.

The exemptions are narrower than the titles. Texas exempts an on-site manager of an apartment complex, and an owner or the owner's employee who leases the owner's real estate — one worded to the on-site role, the other to the owner and the owner's employees. An entity whose designated broker owns less than 10% of it must also carry errors-and-omissions insurance of at least $1 million per occurrence.

Florida's broker definition reaches anyone who, for another and for compensation, rents or offers to negotiate the rental of real property. Its exemption covers salaried employees of an apartment-community owner, or of a registered broker for that owner, who work in the community's on-site rental office in a leasing capacity.

California exempts the resident manager of an apartment building, complex or court, along with that manager's employees, from its leasing and rent-collection licensing requirement.

Read those exemptions against your own org chart, not the job title. An owner's on-site community manager and a third-party firm's community manager can sit on different sides of the line in the same state, because some exemptions — Florida's, and Texas's owner-employee exemption — turn on who employs the person, not only on the duties.

Credentials are a different thing from a license. IREM's CPM, for example, is a voluntary designation — IREM itself requires an active real estate license only where one is required for the position in your state. Treat credentials as evidence of training and commitment, and verify the state license separately.

Verify rather than assume. Ask for the license number, look the person up in your state commission's licensee search where it publishes one, and check that the firm's own license is current if the hire will act under the firm's license.

Rules change, and exemptions are narrow. Confirm who needs a license — and who is exempt — with your state real estate commission before you extend an offer or sign a management agreement.

Set the first 90 days as a written plan. Hand over the systems logins, files, vendor list and keys; schedule a one-on-one with every person on the team; and put the reporting calendar in front of them — what goes to the regional or the owner, when, and who drafts it.

Tie the plan to the numbers you screened for: the collections process they inherit, when renewal offers go out, the make-ready pipeline for the next turn season, and when they bring you their first budget variance with an explanation attached.

Train for fair housing from day one, and document it. HUD's rule at 24 CFR 100.7 makes an owner or management company vicariously liable for a discriminatory housing practice by its agent or employee, whether or not it knew of the conduct. The same rule makes the company directly liable for failing to correct and end discrimination it knew or should have known about.

The federal Fair Housing Act reaches renting decisions on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin and disability; state and local laws can add more.

Licensed staff may carry their own coursework. California real estate licensees complete a three-hour fair housing course and a two-hour implicit bias course as part of the 45 hours of continuing education required each four-year renewal. New York licensees complete 22.5 hours every two years, including at least two hours of cultural competency and three hours on fair housing or discrimination. Set your internal standard for every site employee regardless of licensure.

Do the federal paperwork on time. Every person hired after November 6, 1986 needs a Form I-9. The employee completes Section 1 by the first day of work, you complete Section 2 within three business days, and you keep the form for three years after hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later. E-Verify, a free internet-based system, can check the Form I-9 information against records available to DHS and the SSA to confirm employment eligibility where your company uses it.

Keeping a good community manager matters, because the broader sector churns. In BLS's JOLTS data for 2025, the real estate and rental and leasing industry averaged 1.6% of employees quitting a month and 2.6% total separations a month — a sector-wide series, broader than property management itself.

The levers you control are unglamorous: pay reviewed against the market band, staffing that matches the workload, a growth path toward regional or portfolio scope, on-call terms that are honored in practice, and credit for the renewals and collections wins they deliver.

Employer information, not legal, tax or licensing advice — confirm licensing questions with your state real estate commission and pay and classification questions with the DOL's Wage and Hour Division or employment counsel.