From The Ground Up!

Four years ago I was working at a retail store, a restaurant, and going to college full time. As a whole I was an exhausted human being with few positive things to say about my day to day life. I found myself wondering what kind of career I would find myself in after I received my degree. In a surprise turn of events, I found myself interviewing with an apartment management company I had never heard of before during my senior year at IPFW. It was sooner than I thought I would start looking for a career and it didn’t 100% match up with what I thought I would be doing with my degree, but I was ready to start investing in myself. It was February of 2014 and the weather was still very chilly and snow was still on the ground.

Spring seemed so far away and so did any chance of leaving the retail life. I’d had one interview with Redwood Living and had another scheduled for the first week of March. Because there were exactly zero Redwood Living apartments in Fort Wayne at the time, all of my interviews were through Skype. In preparation for my second interview, I drove by the site that I would be working.

I had imagined half-finished buildings or maybe a parking lot. When I slowly drove (people honking the whole time) by Kroger on Maplecrest and St. Joe Center, I thought “I have to be in the wrong place. This is a FIELD. With a sketchy trailer and a gravel drive.” After I cleared my head of any preconceived judgments, I drove by again and only one thought came to mind – “This looks like a fresh start.”

And it turned out to be the fresh start that changed the trajectory of my life. In my first six months with Redwood Living, we worked out of the trailer with no apartments to show, no community to tour, and no amenities to brag about. Oh! - And no running water. I learned more about the Multi-Family Housing industry in the first two weeks than I had ever known in my life despite living in apartments since high school. I was lucky to have a patient, kind, and funny mentor in the manager I worked with at the time. Fair Housing classes took up the majority of my time and to this day, I am thankful we didn’t have a lot of walk in traffic coming into the trailer. I was terrified of being sued for saying the wrong thing! I got the rare opportunity to slowly get used to this new job and all of the responsibility that comes along with it. I wish more people who are brand new to the industry got the same introduction that I did. I got to learn at my own pace and take in new information as it came. Now I hear about new people come in at all different companies and many people feel like it’s “sink or swim.” I’m very thankful that I got to float around a bit before things got crazy.

We got our first apartment building at Maplecrest by Redwood in August of 2014. It was a long, trying summer butthe first eight apartments were finally done and ready for about the building process during the months leadingup to the release of the first building. One of the most difficult things was knowing that the apartments were finished, beautiful, and ready for habitation and then something holding it all up. Of course it’s always things we can’t see or hear or touch so it was incredibly difficult to explain to the future residents of that building that their move in dates were being pushed back for no apparent (to them) reason.

During the times of uncertainty, I learned the art of making someone feel like everything is going to be A-OK without actually having any concrete facts to give them. That was the biggest struggle for me during the lease up phases with Redwood Living. Not all of it is in our control. Weather, vendors, materials, permits, and 100 other things can keep the building process from going smoothly. Customer service can only get you so far when you don’t have an apartment to move someone into! Having open and honest conversations with prospects is the key in the lease up process. But at the end of the day, when we find someone the perfect apartment home and they know they are the first people to live in that space, it all becomes worth it. We had days that were packed with move in appointments and I will never forget the first time I handed someone keys to their brand new home. It was a feeling I won’t soon forget.

In the last four years, I’ve been a part of for lease up communities with Redwood Living. We currently have 372 apartments in Fort Wayne and a couple hundred more to come in the coming months and years. I chose this crazy life of Redwood Living lease up communities and I am ready and excited to start all over again with three communities getting Phase 2 projects! When I look into the future of Redwood Living, I see it becoming a household name, and I’m excited to say that I was there at the beginning of it all.

Taylor White,

2018 AAFW-NEI Board Member