When Eugene Burger Management Corp’s Lori Burger meets someone new to property management, she always has the same advice: Don’t look down on any job. She started her career as an apartment housekeeper, and now she’s nearly two months into her tenure as IREM’s national president.

Lori (here with husband Stephen, EBMC's president) joined her father-in-law’s eponymous firm in 1979, cleaning the apartments his firm managed. “I couldn’t imagine then what lesson I was supposed to learn,” she says. But the hard work paid off: She worked her way up the ranks to portfolio manager, covering everything from residential to commercial, market-rate to affordable, apartments to retail strip centers, and HOAs to single-family homes. She still picks up a broom when needed, which nabbed her EBMC’s largest assignment to date. A client that owned a 1.2M SF mixed-use building came to the firm’s Northern California HQ to interview EBMC and from the parking lot, spied Lori sweeping by the front door. “That’s when they knew we were the property managers they wanted,” she said.

The firm is still owned by Eugene and his wife Shirley (third and fourth from the left in front, with the family at IREM's national conference in October). Lori, who’s in charge of marketing and business development, tells us it now manages 23,000 condo units, 6,600 apartment units, 1,200 single-family homes, and 2M SF of commercial space in Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, Ohio and Texas. And she’s following Eugene into IREM leadership; he was national president in 1981. It was then he told Stephen and Lori in no uncertain terms to get IREM’s CPM designation, beginning their career-long affiliation with the org. Among Lori’s goals as president: increase young professionals in the industry by reaching out to colleges and employers; and unbundling IREM’s credentialed educational programs to reach more real estate folks, offering professional development courses for all levels of the industry.

Lori has dealt with every imaginable circumstance, from floods to earthquakes and other catastrophes. “They’re great building blocks to help others, which is what makes this career so rewarding,” she says. But her most interesting assignment was managing a luxury condo in Ketcham, ID—which the Dalai Lama happened to be visiting. He had to call into Larry King Live for an interview, but the phone wasn't working, and Lori sprang into action with the local telecom company. (She fixed it, and the Dalai Lama made his interview five minutes before it would have been canceled.) Willie Nelson also came to visit His Holiness during the trip, and Lori had to escort the lead monk handling the Dalai Lama’s affairs to fetch the singer. As they walked down the hallway, he leaned over and whispered, “What does Willie Nelson look like?” Lori laughs.

Outside of work, Lori is a Jeep enthusiast—she and Stephen take their 1970 model off-roading to places like the Rubicon Trail in the Sierra Nevada, or to the mountains of Mexico’s Copper Canyon to bring supplies to small, remote schools. Her two grandsons are also her life, she says; while her son and daughter didn't follow their parents into the industry, perhaps the young boys will join the family biz in the future.