THE KEY
Making a Difference During a Pandemic By Anthony Lanni, Executive Vice President, Residential, QuadReal Property Group LP
At this point of the year, while many of us in the multi-family rental industry would be preoccupied with upcoming property budget cycles, deployment of necessary capital spending and midyear performance reviews, we are instead actively managing the serious impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge to our industry during a time like this is real, however we can draw on the significant experiences and great ideas of our people to sustain our businesses and continue to positively impact the communities we serve. Our heroes have been the front line community management teams who focus on the satisfaction and wellbeing of our resident base; our maintenance teams who work tirelessly to keep our buildings operating safely and efficiently; and our corporate office employees who manage the numerous programs and engagements with residents and other stakeholders. Our business has continued to look at ways to improve and grow, even with the unknowns of a pandemicimpacted future facing us. While none of us could have accurately predicted the way this pandemic would ultimately affect our business, we were quick to marshal all available resources to manage what we rightly assumed
12 | SUMMER 2020
would be a future of unknowns. We were early witnesses to pandemic preparations through our offices in Hong Kong and London, where the first waves of isolation and quarantine occurred. Our QuadReal team here in Canada started to meet on a regular basis to consider what our response would be, what protocols we would have to put in place and what logistic challenges would need to be overcome. Our team worked hard in these early days to overcome the fear and unknowns the virus presented, pulling together across disciplines and functional areas to assess the risk to our residents and assets while trying to educate ourselves on what we were truly up against. We distilled our pandemic preparation efforts into three main buckets: (a) resident safety, (b) resident engagement and (c) employee safety and continuity. The safety of our residents is always a primary driver in our business, so we were quick out of the gate with a mandate to modify access to common areas, increase the frequency of cleaning in our properties, arranged for emergency cleaning of any property where we were advised of a positive COVID-19 case, ensured appropriate physical distancing measures were in place and suspended discretionary
