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

A regional property manager is accountable for a group of communities at once: the consolidated budget and the results behind it, the standards every site runs on, and the property managers who deliver both. Each community still has someone running it day to day. What the regional adds is the layer that keeps the portfolio's numbers, staffing decisions and owner reporting moving together.

The work sits one layer up. Where a property manager fixes a problem at their community, a regional builds the process that keeps it from repeating everywhere, and coaches the managers who run the fix.

Three workstreams run through the week. Finances: rolling up budgets, reviewing variances site by site, and framing capital recommendations for ownership. People: hiring, coaching and, when needed, replacing site managers. Reporting: turning site data into the owner and asset-manager updates that drive decisions.

You need a regional when the layer beneath is missing. The signals show up in your own operation: several site managers each reporting in their own format, owner reporting that eats your evenings, acquisitions landing with nobody to absorb them, and site managers whose development depends entirely on you.

How the role sits against a director of property management or a portfolio manager is an org-design question of its own. Our staffing context guide maps the common structures.

For the work from the candidate's side, our what a regional property manager does career guide covers the role in depth. This page stays on your side of the hire.

Start inside. Your best property managers already know your systems, your standards and your owners, and promoting one keeps that knowledge in the company. The gap to close is the owner-reporting cadence and the coaching habit, and a deliberate handover can close both.

Externally, look for people already running multi-site work: property managers covering a sister community, managers from firms with larger portfolios, and sitting regionals elsewhere in the industry. A regional hire is an experienced hire. The resume should show portfolios, not a single site.

Post the role in more than one kind of place: a board that lists only property management work, apartment association job boards, and the general boards for reach. Our where to post property management jobs guide compares the options role by role.

Whatever the channel, the pay range may be required in the ad. California requires the pay scale in job postings, and Washington requires the wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits, once an employer has 15 or more employees. New York requires the compensation or a range when advertising a job performed at least partly in New York and the employer has four or more employees. Colorado requires good-faith disclosure of the pay or range, a general description of benefits, and the expected application close date. Posting rules keep changing, so confirm the current requirement with your state labor department.

Write the posting against the real territory: how many communities and site managers, the travel share, the reporting line, and whether the hire inherits operations or builds them. Vague territory terms make the hire hard to evaluate — for both of you.

When you are ready to post, our hiring hub collects the employer guides on this site, and posting your regional role here puts it in front of people who already work in property management.

Screen for evidence at the portfolio level. The candidate should walk you through the numbers they owned across several sites — consolidated occupancy, collections and expense performance — and separate what they personally moved from what they reported upward.

Coaching is the skill resumes hide. Ask which site managers they developed and where those people went next. Ask how they handled an underperforming manager, and what changed at the weakest community they inherited.

Owner reporting is the second pillar of the job. Ask to see a redacted owner or asset-manager update they built. Strong candidates explain a variance briefly and say what they did about it. Weak ones describe the report's formatting.

Ask about an acquisition or a troubled community they absorbed: what they found, what they changed first, and how the owner heard about it.

Travel tolerance is a real screen, not a formality. Ask how large a territory they covered, how often they were physically at each community, and how they ran a middle-of-the-night emergency from two hours away. A candidate who cannot describe the rhythm has not lived it.

Screen fair housing judgment as a leadership trait, because their standards multiply across every site they run. 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 even without knowledge of the conduct.

Finish with systems, at portfolio depth. Have them open a consolidated report they actually ran — a roll-up rent roll, a delinquency summary by site, a variance pack — in the platform they used daily. Fluency shows in seconds.

A regional hire carries the same compliance surface as any management hire — pay-disclosure laws, selection-procedure rules, the FCRA and state fair-chance timing — plus one wrinkle: the role may cover sites in more than one state. 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 territory, the team the hire would run, the travel expectation and the pay range, following the posting rules of every state the job touches.
2. Screen against the portfolio. Sort resumes by portfolio evidence — communities run, managers supervised, states covered, asset mix — rather than by title polish.
3. Interview to a structure. Ask every candidate the same core set and score the answers against your criteria. If you use scored exercises, the federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures govern the use of tests and other selection procedures. Keep every exercise job-related and scored the same way for everyone.
4. Make finalists show work. A mock owner update built from a redacted roll-up, or a written plan for their first 90 days in the territory, tells you more than another interview round.
5. Check references upward. Talk to the owner, director or vice president they reported to. Ask about coaching, the quality of their reporting, and how the portfolio actually performed.
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. Give a clear, conspicuous written disclosure that consists solely of that disclosure — no waivers or extra terms on the page — and get the candidate'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 the notice must include a copy of the consumer report you relied on and a copy of "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act." Only then take the adverse action, and follow it with a notice naming the screening company, its address and phone number, and the fact that it did not make the decision. Federal law sets no fixed waiting period between the two notices, so build a reasonable review window into your timeline.
7. Handle criminal history carefully. EEOC's enforcement guidance on arrest and conviction records was still published on eeoc.gov at our October 2026 review. It treats an arrest alone as insufficient to reject a candidate. 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 or considering conviction history until after a conditional offer. New York City requires the same conditional-offer timing and adds its own Fair Chance Process before withdrawing an offer over conviction history. Washington instead bars criminal-history questions and checks until the applicant is initially determined otherwise qualified. Check the rules where each site sits.
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 date the record was made or the personnel action involved, whichever occurs later.
9. Close the offer in writing. Put the territory, the travel expectation, the pay and bonus structure, the on-call terms and the first-year goals into the offer letter, and set the bar while enthusiasm is high.

Anchor on the federal data, and read its label first. The BLS occupation series for the field is property, real estate and community association managers counted together (SOC 11-9141), across all industries. In the data we reviewed, regional managers are not broken out within it — this is the closest BLS category for the role, not a regional-only series.

In BLS's May 2025 OEWS survey, that occupation earned a median of $69,990 a year ($33.65 an hour). The middle half of the occupation earns between $50,720 (25th percentile) and $97,910 (75th percentile).

OEWS counts payroll employees only, so the figures never reflect an owner-operator's income. For the state and metro tables, our regional property manager salary data page carries the full BLS breakdown. Use your own market's row, and adjust for the number of communities and site managers 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) under 29 CFR 541.600. 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 have to carry it too. The executive exemption expects a primary duty of managing the enterprise or a recognized department, customarily and regularly directing two or more employees, and hiring-or-firing recommendations given particular weight. The administrative exemption expects office or non-manual work tied to running the business, with discretion and independent judgment on matters of significance. A salary alone never makes anyone exempt.

The highly compensated employee route applies at $107,432 in total annual compensation, including at least $684 a week on a salary or fee basis. It never covers non-management employees in maintenance, construction and similar occupations, however highly paid.

A housing benefit, where your company offers one, never counts toward the salary test either: the level is measured exclusive of board, lodging or other facilities.

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 effective January 1, 2026, which works out to $70,304 a year for 2026. Confirm your state's current threshold with its labor agency before you classify anyone.

Structure incentives around the portfolio results you screened for — consolidated collections, renewals, expense performance. If the role ever sits non-exempt, nondiscretionary bonuses must be included in the regular rate when overtime is calculated. Have employment counsel or the DOL's Wage and Hour Division confirm classification before you commit to a structure.

Licensing for this role is a state question — and for a regional, several state questions. Whether managing or leasing for others requires a real estate license, and who is exempt, is set state by state, and exemptions turn on duties, pay and who the person works for. Our state-by-state licensing guide explains how the rules are structured; your state real estate commission is the authority.

One state's rule never transfers to another, so a regional covering communities in more than one state needs the license answer for each one. Build the check into the process. Ask for license numbers during screening, verify them in each commission's licensee search where it publishes one, and confirm the firm's own license is current if the hire will act under it.

Credentials are a different thing from a license. IREM's CPM is itself not a license: IREM requires CPM graduates to hold an active real estate license only if one is required for their position in their state. Treat CPM, ARM, CAM, CAPS, CMCA and PCAM as evidence of training and commitment — preferred qualifications in a posting, never a substitute for the license check.

Rules change, and exemptions are narrow. Confirm who needs a license — and who is exempt — with the real estate commission in every state your regional will cover, before you extend an offer.

Set the first 90 days as a written plan with the territory as its spine. A visit to every community in it. A working session with each site manager. The reporting calendar in front of them, and a date for their first consolidated variance review with you.

Hand the portfolio over deliberately: systems logins and reports, budgets and variances by site, the vendor and contract list, open capital projects, and the owner or asset-manager expectations in writing.

Do the federal paperwork on time. Every person hired after November 6, 1986 to work for pay in the U.S. 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.

Put fair housing training in week one, and document it. The federal Fair Housing Act reaches renting decisions on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin and disability, and state and local laws can add more. Under HUD's rule at 24 CFR 100.7, your company is vicariously liable for a discriminatory housing practice by its agent or employee even without knowledge of the conduct. It is also directly liable for failing to correct and end discrimination it knew or should have known about. Your regional sets what normal looks like at every site they run, which is why their fluency matters. Our fair housing training guide covers the employer side.

Licensed staff may carry coursework of their own. 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 training and at least three hours on fair housing or discrimination. Set your internal standard for every site employee regardless of licensure.

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

The levers you control are unglamorous: pay reviewed against the market band, staffing the portfolio can actually carry, travel terms honored in practice, a growth path toward director or vice-president scope, and credit for the portfolio's wins. Our employee turnover and onboarding guides cover the mechanics.

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.