Hines Launches Apartment Property Management Venture

Hines has launched Willowick Residential, a multifamily property management firm.

The new property management company will work in partnership with Hines’ growing multifamily portfolio of 63 projects across 38 US cities, including luxury towers, urban mid-rises and traditional garden-style apartments. It is now managing nine properties throughout the US with more in the pipeline. Over the next two years, it expects to have 10,000 units under management.

Willowick will offer acquisition services, advisory services, engineering and maintenance, team member recruiting and development, lease-up and transition services, marketing and communications, reputation management, market analysis and research, vendor compliance and information technology. The venture is named after founder Gerald D. Hines’ first multifamily residential building in Houston’s River Oaks area.

Lisa Newton, senior vice president of Multifamily Operations at Hines, says the company’s knowledge of its assets as the developer puts it in a better position than a third-party manager to create value.

“We know our assets better than anybody does,” Newton tells GlobeSt.com. “The ability to add value through something that you own and know from beginning to end is just greater when you have that ownership mentality.”

Initially, Hines isn’t targeting third-party management, though it is open to future possibilities. 

“Our desire is to focus on our own projects,” Newton says. “I think we’ll get into third-party management, probably organically by retaining management. We’ve had some inquiries over recent years from certain partners about if we will be doing this [management] and when we would be ready. But that’s not the focus today.”

While Hines ramped up its apartment construction in 2012, the company didn’t initially have the scale and structure to do its own management. But it was always a topic of discussion.

“We were under more of a merchant-build structure and switched to more of a strategic longer-term hold [strategy] with our development,” Newton says. “As we started having more developments come out of the ground and had more scale in our Southwest region and our Midwest region, we decided to bring it [management] in house.”

Initially, the company wanted its property management business to be national by the end of 2020, but COVID stymied those plans and presented challenges with staffing up the business.

“The onboarding process is different,” Newton says. “I’ve got 35 onsite associates, most of whom I have not met face to face. Though we’ve had so many Zoom calls you forget that you haven’t actually met them face to face before. We’ve had really good luck retaining our onsite teams with the [property] transitions [to Willowick] that we’ve done.”

While Hines announced the formation of Willowick this week, it actually launched the venture earlier in the year. “We just wanted some of our partners to hear it from us first, rather than through an announcement in a press release,” Newton says, explaining the gap between when Willowick began operating and the announcement. “We also had some refining to do to our public-facing materials. We launched a new website.”