Several parts of commercial real estate were permanently changed by the effects of the pandemic. Increasingly, it looks like property management is one of them.

Almost half of multifamily owners and property managers find it either difficult or very difficult to hire new maintenance staff, while 45% find it either difficult or very difficult to retain workers once hired, a new survey from Parks Associates and GE Appliances found. Just under 25% of respondents reported being understaffed at the time they were surveyed.

The downstream effects of such shortages is that maintenance staffs are not just smaller, but less effective, the survey found. Over 30% of respondents reported negative effects on their residents' experiences because of difficulties in getting repairs done in a reasonable time frame.

Testimonial responses from survey participants pin their difficulties to an inability to fully recover from the effects of the pandemic's first year: a combination of budget cuts, a mass exit of workforce due to illness or fear of getting sick, and the upward pressure on wages that resulted, Parks and GE found.

“A lot of people left and never came back," one respondent said. "I had to rehire an entire staff."

“Hard to keep employees … the good ones are hard to keep because you can't pay them what they deserve,” another said.

As with healthcare real estate, the multifamily industry may be forced to adapt to staff shortages on a permanent basis. Parks Associates, a consumer technology market research firm, and GE Appliances, included encouragement to install smart appliances as a way to head off maintenance requests before they became major issues.

Not all reductions in employee headcounts have been involuntary. National apartment giants UDR, Equity Residential and Essex Property Trust cut property staff last year and introduced more automated systems for maintenance requests while reporting record profits.