“If you have a pulse on what’s going on, you don’t lose a building”

For prop­erty manager Desi Ndreu, constant commu­ni­ca­tion is the name of the game. A typical day for her consists of fielding hundreds of emails from the many people she over­sees across her 18-building port­folio. Her work spans every­thing from handling indi­vidual resi­dent complaints to over­seeing multi­mil­lion-dollar mechan­ical over­hauls, and, in the past few years, steering her port­folio toward compli­ance with Local Law 97 (LL97). It’s a job that demands both adapt­ability and empathy, along with a depth of knowl­edge of how build­ings work and what keeps the people inside them happy.

Over 34 years in the busi­ness, Ndreu has seen the field of prop­erty manage­ment evolve. But what hasn’t changed, she says, is the impor­tance of staying in touch. Her philos­ophy is simple: ​“If you have a pulse on what’s going on, you don’t lose a building.” Over a video call with Skylight, Ndreu shared how she keeps her finger on that pulse.

Skylight: Can you tell me a little bit about the build­ings you manage?

Desi Ndreu: I currently manage 18 build­ings. 16 are in Manhattan, two are in Westchester. My largest is about a 500-unit building. My smallest is 70 units.

Most of them are co-ops; some — two or three — are condos. They are all currently embarked on LL97. Some are in the begin­ning stage, some are knee-deep, and some have worked towards getting to the goal lines of no fines in 2030.

So, how many people do you oversee?

We have three different statuses of employees: The majority of my build­ings are [SEIU] 32BJ, superintendent/​resident managers, handymen, porters, doormen. A couple of them are non-union in Manhattan, and there’s different non-unions. 

The average building is about seven [employees], so I would say that we would prob­ably have about 100 staff members all in. I try to remember all their names; I go to the build­ings every week, I see the supers, the doormen that are on staff. The only doormen that I prob­ably don’t really have a great rela­tion­ship with are the ones that work overnight, because I don’t see them as much.

How would you define good manage­ment in the context of building performance? 

Managing a building is a team effort. It starts with manage­ment and the [resi­den­tial] board. The board gives us the guide­lines, and manage­ment enforces it; we work with our employees to kind of coax them to under­stand how to enforce it. 

[Nowadays,] it’s an under­standing that we’re in 2025, and things are different. A 2025 prop­erty manager is not the same as a 1980s prop­erty manager. The world has changed and evolved. You’ve got to be able to pivot as an agent — you have to create a custom manage­ment package. What works on 73rd Street in Manhattan, manage­ment style, will not work on 14th Street in Manhattan, because they’re different areas of New York that have a different culture. So we have to adapt to the culture of the building.

My building on 73rd Street, which is 70 units — because it’s such a small building, when we have some­thing such as arrears, instead of me drafting a letter and sending it to all the resi­dents, I call them up, because it makes a differ­ence. Whereas [in my 500-unit building] on 14th Street, we draft a letter. Then, if we don’t hear from them, we call them up.

We had chil­dren [in one building] on the East side that were running around, so I called the parents and I said, ​“You know, this is causing hard­ship on my doorman. They’re trying to do their job but now you’re adding extra to the job descrip­tion, which is not fair to them.”

And they under­stood. Same thing with a resi­dent who was getting so many pack­ages but not picking them up. I said, ​“You’re getting all these pack­ages and my doorman has to constantly pick them up. They’re heavy. You’re not around.” You know.

It’s under­standing your client, under­standing your client’s needs, being on top of your client’s needs, and ensuring that your staff is educated and trained to pick up those same needs. Everyone being on the same page is really important.

At the WISE event where we met, you mentioned some­thing that floored me, which was that you commu­ni­cate with every one of your build­ings every day. Is that right?

Yeah. 300 emails a day.

Talk to me about why you do that, and what differ­ence it makes.

I started this busi­ness not because I wanted to be in this busi­ness — I was actu­ally supposed to go to law school. But my dad was a super­in­ten­dent, and he asked if I wanted to be his assis­tant on site and I said sure, because I wasn’t doing anything, and I fell in love with this line of work.

I real­ized early on that commu­ni­ca­tion is really key. I have a pulse on what’s going on. When you lose a building, it’s because you don’t have a pulse. And in the 34 years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve never lost a building, because I have a pulse.

Of course, I’ve made mistakes. But then, you know what? You try not to make the same mistake over. You apol­o­gize, you jump on the horse, you fix it, and you move on. And [resi­dents] respect that. They respect the fact that you work hard. They respect the fact that you are atten­tive and that makes a world of difference.

It’s like the old saying: ​“You never know what’s behind that person.” When you walk past someone in New York City, every­body in New York looks mean, but we don’t know the story they have. So if you smile, you set the tone. And I think commu­ni­ca­tion’s the same way — if you commu­ni­cate, you set the tone. If people know what’s going to happen, they don’t like it, but they can accept it, right?

One of my build­ings, 7 E. 14th St., we’re rebuilding it mechan­i­cally in the base­ment. We’re also going into every­one’s apart­ment, cleaning their duct work. We are also opening up a chase well, and replacing four pipes in the chase well; the eleva­tors are being modernized. 

Now, on Monday of this week, they had no water because a pipe burst. They woke up to no water at all on a Monday, and then on Tuesday, they woke up to no hot water. They had the right to complain; waking up Monday with no water is pretty crappy. They were at their limit. So I drafted a memo. I said, ​“Totally under­stand you are at your limit, right­fully so.” I said, “‘I appre­ciate you’ is too small of a word for what you are allowing us to do.” And I said, ​“You know, we’ll be done in November. Then we’re going to be giving you the holi­days off, free of vendors, and we’ll start up again in January.”

I didn’t get any complaints from a 500-unit building.

Switching tacks now, you mentioned LL97 at the top. I’m wondering how your approach to managing build­ings has changed since the law came into effect, and what your atti­tude toward decar­boniza­tion as a prop­erty manager is — whether you think of it as just part of the job descrip­tion, or whether it’s some­thing you care about personally. 

I learned about LL97 through Allen Hobbs of NYC Accelerator. I believe in 2015 or 2016, we started the conver­sa­tion, and the more I spoke to him, honestly, the dumber I felt. It was just so compli­cated, because you have [only] one chance to get it done right. It’s a lot of money, and there are share­holders that have to pay for this. So the more I got educated, the more that I needed to ask more ques­tions and reed­u­cate myself.

Any type of repair that I’ve made, going from 2016 to present, is to make sure that [the building is] in line with LL97. I’m not just going to repair it in kind. If it means paying a couple more dollars to upgrade to make sure that you lower your carbon emis­sions, that’s what you have to do. We started off early enough on these bigger build­ings to make sure that we get to where we need to before everyone jumps on the band­wagon [with incen­tive applications]. 

The bigger capital expenses might not be able to bring you over the top where you’re in compli­ance in 2030, but they’ll bring you close enough; for now, [I tell resi­dents,] let’s look at the low-hanging fruit to create the bigger picture.

I defi­nitely think it’s the right thing to do. If we don’t take the measures today, [there] won’t be a tomorrow. When we had those [forest] fires and the winds were blowing from Canada and we couldn’t breathe, that’s what we’re going to get. So we are oblig­ated as human beings to do [some­thing].

[However,] I do think that when the city rolled out LL97, they should’ve rolled it out with help, because not all build­ings have the cash funds to do so.

And then they did come out with a PACE loan, but that was like six percent, when the loans were 2.8 percent. It’s great that the city rolled it out, but there should’ve been help in getting us to where we need to be. A tax credit for the build­ings, for the share­holders, for the owners, for the land­lord — some­thing along those lines. 

But I’m all for it, and I think it’s the right thing to do.

When you see the need for decar­boniza­tion upgrades in your build­ings, how do you convince the share­holders or the owners to get on board with those changes?

It’s a lot of educa­tion. I tell the board members that their job is to be a board member. Their job is not to manage the building; that’s my job.

My job is to get them all the infor­ma­tion they need. I like to get the opinion of two or three or four different engi­neers and then I bring in four sepa­rate engi­neers [with different perspec­tives], and then we inter­view them and we spend a lot of time with each of them.

We ask them to kind of give us a foot­print of what they think is best for the building, with an esti­mated budget of what it would cost. And then we then take the four and narrow it down to two, and then we spend more time with those two, and then we go with the one we choose to move forward with. 

So it’s a lot of research, a lot of different opin­ions, a lot of reaching out to build­ings [to see] what they’ve done and [asking] are they happy. A lot of reading arti­cles, and going back to those build­ings, and then having the board be able to make a deci­sion because they’ve done their homework. 

I want to end by looking forward. What do you think the next few years are going to look like for prop­erty manage­ment in New York City?

For those that fell asleep at the wheel, I think there’s going to be a lot of work that needs to be done. Building [share­holders and resi­dents] are going to prob­ably make changes because they’re going to realize that they weren’t educated enough by their prop­erty manager to get them to where they need to be.

I think for a lot of these build­ings, with some­thing such as LL97, [the next bench­mark is] 2030. It sounds like a long time, but take elevator modi­fi­ca­tions, for example — an elevator mod takes about 14 to 18 weeks of engi­neering. Then you pick up a contractor, and then that takes another prob­ably 20 weeks before you’re ready to go. So you’re already looking at December of next year, if you haven’t started yet.

There will be a huge tran­si­tion of manage­ment firms, and the supply and demand in New York City is going to go crazy. The demand will be high, but supply will be low. So with this infla­tion, I think build­ings are really going to get hit on the head by a lot of these contrac­tors. It’s not going to be a pretty thing, for people who are behind. And if you haven’t started any of these projects as of today, you are way behind.