Twenty-five years ago, AIMCO — once an apartment giant — shed its third-party management operation.

When that happened, Greg Wiseman left the Denver-based REIT and founded Apartment Management Consultants. Brenda Barrett soon joined him.

One management assignment for a former client in West Jordan, Utah, led to another and another. Soon, the Cottonwood Heights, Utah-based apartment operator was on a strong growth trajectory.

In 2015, it operated roughly 71,000 units, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council’s annual Top 50 list. By 2020, that number increased to 92,000 before hitting 152,989 units on the latest list, ranking No. 7 nationally.

“Since 2019, we’ve acquired a minimum of 10,000 units a year,” CEO Brenda Barrett told Multifamily Dive. “There were a couple of years that it was 20,000-plus units. It has been steady for six years.”

Over its 25 years in business, Apartment Management Consultants has not engaged in mergers, preferring organic growth.

“We've never had one person in our organization that has ever been focused on generating new business for us,” Barrett said. “And it's really been starting with a small core group of clients in the first couple of years that has led to where we are today.”

Here, Barrett talks with Multifamily Dive about organic growth, technology and company goals.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

MULTIFAMILY DIVE: How have you grown AMC over the years?

BRENDA BARRETT: Initially, when we started with a small number of clients, they were using four or five different property management companies. They got the AMC experience, and one by one, market by market, they started transitioning their properties to AMC.

As they continued to buy properties, they would use AMC as their exclusive management company. A lot of our initial properties and clients, almost all of them, we still manage for today, 20-plus years later. For a lot of them, we’re their exclusive management company. 

What hires have you made recently as you grow your company?

This last year, we have definitely been making investments in technology and people. We hired our first CFO ever in November 2024. Since then, we've hired a head of treasury, an executive vice president of client services, a risk management team, a CIO, a director of affordable housing, a transitions team and a procurement director. 

We’re making those investments along with our tech stack. You won't believe it, but we just recently converted to Microsoft 365 in the last couple of months. I think all of our new hires just assumed that that was in place. We just successfully finished the launch of all of our properties and corporate team to Microsoft 365.

How have client preferences played a role in your technology adoption?

I think a key to our success is that our clients have considered us a low-cost operator. On the property side and on the corporate side, we’ve always run lean. A lot of our clients weren’t interested in many of the different products out there.

Coming off of many, many years of very favorable occupancies, they just weren't necessarily interested in a product that had a lot of bells and whistles but wasn't going to increase occupancy or increase rents and would only increase expenses.

As clients were interested in technologies, we would certainly do research and adopt them, but we've never been a company that's made any across-the-board decisions and said, ‘If you want to use AMC, you have to use X, Y, Z systems.’ And, I think our clients have appreciated that.

Have you incorporated centralization?

Centralization became more popular during COVID, with restrictions in place. We have not adopted that in any meaningful way until recently. We did invest in an invoice ingestion system that will help give back some time to our property managers and just have an overall more efficient process. 

Is it a goal to hit 200,000 units under management?

We do not have an overall number in mind. We don't care to be the biggest. We want to be the best for our clients. 

We know that our clients — just the existing clients without even bringing on any new clients to AMC — have been waiting on the sidelines for when the time is right to buy. We want to be ready for when they start purchasing again. So, the investments with people and technology are really geared around understanding that our clients are going to be in buy mode soon.

When do you think sales will start again?

In the last 60 days, we've certainly been looking at deals more than the previous 60 days for our clients. We’re definitely seeing more activity in the last couple of months.

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