Talent in the pipeline: internship programs are a win-win solution for students seeking industry experience and for companies looking to fill positions with the newest talent.

The trip marked not only her first visit to the Washington, D.C., area, but for Sarah Atkinson, CAM, NALP, then a junior at Ball State University, it also represented her first time living outside Indiana.

However, because of the thorough education the residential property management (RPM) major received in the classroom on the ins and outs of apartment industry management, the trip in the summer of 2004 filled her more with curiosity than apprehension.

She arrived with the confidence level needed in a young professional whose sights were set on proving herself at one of the country's largest real estate investment trusts (REITs).

"I was excited and nervous," Atkinson recalled. "At the start, the whole thing was a whirlwind."

Atkinson joined four interns from Virginia Tech in working at Archstone-Smith that summer, and although being the only one from Ball State made Atkinson "the new kid in the group," as she described, she quickly became part of the team and acclimated to Archstone-Smith's daily onsite management responsibilities.

Atkinson said that because Archstone-Smith did such a good job of developing a well-rounded internship program by providing specific duties on a planned weekly schedule and covering all aspects of onsite and corporate management, her time with Archstone-Smith proved valuable for both her and the company.

For example, as part of the eight-week program, she joined another intern to form a team charged with creating a presentation on management and marketing for a new community. Her team was asked to study the competition, set rent, develop a comprehensive six-month budget and create a staffing plan. In the competition against another team of interns, they had to present the plan to senior operations executives.

"This was something that normally an employee is given six months to prepare," Atkinson said. So, if ever there was a chance to find out first-hand if a career in apartment management was for her, this was it. She said the internship experience was a pivotal factor in exciting her about graduating and entering the industry as a full-time employee.

Today, Atkinson is a leasing consultant and management trainee for a 250-unit Class A community in Richmond, Va., owned by Indianapolis-based Edward Rose Companies.

Atkinson said she will always remember what her first property management supervisor, Jane Allen of J.C. Hart Co. in Indianapolis, said about working in the apartment industry: "Once you join this industry, it gets in your blood, and you always come back." Atkinson said, "I have to agree."

A Mutually Beneficial Arrangement

As apartment industry professionals continue to seek ways to find qualified, well-performing employees, RPM internships offered through universities with four-year degree programs, such as Ball State, Virginia Tech, Florida State and University of North Texas, continue to gain in popularity.

According to professors at universities that offer RPM programs and industry executives who provide internship opportunities, apartment companies are becoming more competitive in their efforts to land these young professionals, dozens of whom graduate with the confidence and skills needed to make a positive impact at apartment communities of all types.

"It's a two-way street between student and employer when it comes to the benefits of a college internship program," said Howard Campbell, a 30-year industry veteran and Ball State faculty member. "Work-related experience provides evidence that a student can do a job. By offering an internship, employers are given the opportunity to evaluate a student's abilities and knowledge, and the student gets the chance to evaluate the company and its supervisors."

Campbell said for internship programs to succeed, all must understand that these students are not going there just to be seasonal help or to warm a chair.

Atkinson said an internship program is most beneficial when all people involved in the internship sit down ahead of time and discuss expectations and goals.

Jessica Brown, a senior in Virginia Tech's RPM program, served an internship with KSI Management in Washington, D.C., last year. She was assigned to a tax-credit community that was in its lease-up stage.

"It is important that the companies challenge their interns," Brown said. "We are so eager to prove ourselves and to get a chance to shine. We want to show that we can deal with a difficult situation."

Brown said internships help college students to experience what working in the industry would be like. "One example I noticed was office teamwork," Brown said. "You can learn in a classroom what everyone in a leasing office does, but when you are at an internship, you experience what it is truly like to work together as a team."

Programs Work For REITs, Third-Party Firms

Alex Jackiw, CAPS, CPM, President, Buckingham Management, an Indianapolis-based full-service real estate company, is an adjunct professor and RPM Advisory Board member at Virginia Tech and Ball State.

She said that some community owners might have concerns about using a fee-based management company that has interns as part of its management staff. However, Jackiw said, its interns' high level of talent and knowledge make it easy to convince Buckingham's clients of their merit.

When a struggling community in the Indianapolis market came to Buckingham Management to inquire about its third-party fee management business, Jackiw confidently assured her client that Buckingham could assign some of its best talent to the community. "It's from these university programs that the best talent is coming through the pipeline," Jackiw said.

"For employers, being a part of these universities' internship programs gives you access to a huge talent pool of incredibly bright and capable students at a time when we, as an industry, so desperately need them," Jackiw said.

Buckingham has brought on board 18 interns and ultimately hired eight as full-time staff members since it began its internship program in 2000. The company tailors its internship programs to meet its needs and fit the profile of the student it hires. Jackiw said her company's corporate internship program resulted from wanting to accommodate a fifth-year Virginia Tech RPM student who sought to gain experience in asset management rather than daily onsite operations, as that student had already served an onsite management internship.

In this case, Buckingham's senior executives looked at their schedules to see if they had any long-range project planning coming up. This way, the company could expose interns to high-level development decisions, design, purchasing, repositioning and human resources, and ask them to read appraisals and market surveys. Jackiw said in another case, one of its interns sat in with its risk management team as it went through the entire process of negotiating the property's insurance policy.

"For students interning onsite, they are getting a view from 5,000 feet of what working in our industry is all about," Jackiw said. "For interns in a corporate program, it's more like a view from 30,000 feet," she said.

"We want to be able to give interns meaningful work on projects that they could take part in from start to finish," she said. "We wanted to challenge them so that they could break out of their comfort zones."

In other cases, Buckingham asked its interns to do walkthroughs of units at a community and to formulate a resident profile based on unit size. The interns also were asked to research the demographics of the area and to give a full presentation about what they learned.

Jackiw said one intern took the initiative to write an acquisition due diligence manual. That manual became the basis from which Buckingham's current manual was written, she said.

A Chance to Do It All

Nancy McClean, HR Coordinator for Archstone-Smith in Arlington, Va., said her company has welcomed interns for the past five years and typically brings on four or five students each summer. Archstone-Smith asks applicants for resumes and letters of recommendation from their deans. It also asks students to write an essay on why they want to work for Archstone-Smith.

Archstone-Smith interns are assigned a mentor and are exposed to all facets of onsite property management at a variety of community types, and they rotate job responsibilities and communities each week. Interns one week might perform maintenance at a 300-unit garden style community and work in the leasing office of a 1,200-unit high rise the next week.

Rosemary Goss, Ph.D., Professor, Virginia Tech, said most of her students find their internships by establishing relationships with their advisory board members.

The students meet with them at least twice per year (fall and spring) and all attend Virginia Tech's annual career fair in March.

Career fairs, also held at the other universities with RPM programs, assist students in finding available internships and bring greater awareness about their RPM programs to apartment management companies, Goss said.

Ball State hosts career fairs in the fall and spring. Ball State Professor and Director of the Residential Property Management Program Carla Earhart said 90 percent of her students' internships are served at BSU advisory board members' companies.

"Companies that are deciding to begin an internship program need to realize that it takes a lot of work and resources to administer," said Archstone-Smith Group Vice President, Human Resources, Ron Lester. "You have to set expectations for the program. But the payback is great, and this, in turn, makes it easy to sell to senior management. The NAA Education Institute is ready to help companies get an internship program started."

Overcoming Internship Challenges

Are Interns a Threat? Archstone-Smith Group Vice President, Human Resources, Ron Lester said, "Companies who hire interns must be up front with their full-time staff about why the company is using a college student intern because otherwise, the staff might feel their job security is being threatened."

Starry-Eyed. Alex Jackiw CAPS. CPM President, Buckingham Management, said that when interns first arrive at one of her communities, "I intentionally do not show them the glitz and glamour during job shadowing," Jackiw said. "You have to learn all aspects of property management. Students need that broad spectrum to make them marketable and to move up to senior management."

Carla Earhart, Ball State University Professor and Director of the Residential Property Management Program, said, "For their first internship, many interns really want to work in an 'A' community But for their second or third internships, they want the challenge of a 'B' or 'C' community."

Impatient Generation Y. Jackiw said management is facing the challenge of dealing with the personalities that come from Generation Y (age 12-27) employees entering the workforce. "With them can come a certain level of impatience in terms of getting a promotion," Jackiw said. "To them, it's 'I did this yesterday and now I'm an expert. What's next?'"

When management stresses patience to overeager young employees, former Ball State University RPM intern Sarah Atkinson, CAM, NALP, said the younger workers hear and understand it.

"We realize that we need to become the best, most fully developed candidate to move on," Atkinson said:

Virginia Tech RPM program senior Jessica Brown said that before serving an internship, students might be impatient. However, she said. "Doing the internship helps the students realize what it takes to move up."--P.B.

Diary of an Intern

Residential Property Management students participating in intern programs are asked to record daily legs of their on-the-job activities. Following is a sample of three days during Kristen Schefft's internship this past summer for Post Properties.

Monday, 6/12/06: My First Day

For the first three weeks I am working at Post Forest in Fairfax, Va On my first day, I toured the apartment with my mentor. We saw some vacant apartments, viewed the mode s and walked some move-outs Post Forest is one of the first Post properties to use a pricing program that updates each day. I learned what goes into the program and how to use it through Post's property management software provider. On top of this very busy and eventful day, I learned how to use our key tracking software, how to read what availabilities we have, and which apartments are on notice for the time At the end of the day, I put together a move-in file with the help of my mentor.

Monday, 6/19/06: My First Lease

My third day at Post Forest was an eventful start after NAA [Education Conference & Exposition]. There was only one other employee in the office for part of the day, so I had to do a lot more work on my own. I entered an application, watched tours, took rent and learned how to enter acknowledgements of notice to move out. At the end of the day, I took out my first traffic or a tour. An hour later, the prospects came back to fill out an application. I got my first lease on my third day at Post Forest.

Wednesday, 7/26/06: My Fair Housing Lesson

[At her new assignment at Post Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C.] First, I answered leads that came in last night from the answering service to tell prospects about our availability. Then I had a prospect going through resident check for my ease so needed to make a move-in folder for him. My assistant manager then approved my file and the person will be ready to move in by the end of August.

had a lot of calls from people looking for three-year leases and diplomat clauses. We do neither of those so they were snort phone calls, I am getting very familiar With the property so I was able to answer lots of Questions on the phone today.

At the end of the night, a lady came in at 5:35 p.m. wanting a tour. Since we are unable to give tours after 5:30 p.m., I told her, and she was really upset. She did not understand what fair housing was and what discrimination was. It was pretty unpleasant because she would not listen to why I could not co it and she kept yelling and thinking I could bend the rules. She final y calmed down and then listened to what apartments we had available. She would not even shake my hand when she left.

Internship Programs Structures: Two Example

Virginia Tech's RPM program's students' level of participation in internships has grown considerably the past three years. Two years ago, Professor Rosemary Goss, Ph.D,. supervised 23 students; last year it was 33 and this year the number grew to 49. Students at Virginia Tech and Ball State University must complete and pass prescribed introductory RPM courses before becoming eligible to participate in an internship. Students may participate more than once in internships--and many do--but only once for credit.

The Virginia Tech internship program involves 240 hours of work to earn four credits. During [ne internship, students must keep a weekly log; prepare a presentation about the company that has hired them; describe workplace situations they encountered during the internship and describe either how they successfully handled them or how they would handle them better the next time; write a personal evaluation; and give a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation on their overall experiences during the internship.

The employer is responsible for paying the interns, providing them with housing and preparing written student evaluations.

Ball State University has two types of internship programs. Its short-term internship is 200 hours and covers mostly leasing. This format is often used during the school year Students must compile a weekly log, including details of their assignments They are given mid-year and end-of-year reviews.

BSU's long-term program requires 30 hours per week for 12 to 15 weeks and usually is conducted during the summer. It covers all phases of property management and includes some corporate office experience, when possible, As with the short program, students are responsible for keeping weekly logs, including details of their assignments.--P.B.

Paul R. Bergeron III is NAA's Director of Communications. He can be reached at 703/518-6141 Ext. 137 or [e-mail].