Jeff McKissack, president of Defense by Design, brought a sobering message to this year’s TAA ONE Conference. In multifamily, often the community reputation drives strong occupancy rates, and yet most management teams inadvertently lose the narrative by not being responsive, leading into reactive PR hands, turning the narrative to someone else.
McKissack’s case for proactive PR began with a tragic story from a colleague in protective services. A resident had asked to be moved within his own community after months of escalating tension with the family upstairs, but management would not waive the standard deposit policy to allow the transfer, and the situation deteriorated over the course of thirty weeks. When management ultimately evicted the upstairs family, the conflict had grown beyond anyone’s ability to contain it, and that same day it ended in a fatal confrontation at the leasing office between the evicted father and the property manager. The case settled quickly and quietly, but McKissack’s point was never the tragedy itself; it was how preventable it had been, and how even modest discretionary authority at the property level could have defused the situation long before it reached that point.
Perception is not only reality, other people’s perceptions become the property’s reality. Reputation, not marketing, drives inquiry. He pointed to a Dallas example in which AT&T had received a written warning from a risk adviser months before announcing its downtown HQ move, flagging concerns about crime and conditions in the area. Once that warning surfaced publicly, McKissack asked the obvious questions back to the room. What happens to occupancy in that building, to revenue, to the surrounding tax base?
Incidents now move faster than most teams are ready for. McKissack walked through a realistic timeline. At 11:42 p.m., police activity was reported on the property. At 12:15 a.m., a resident posts a video. By morning, local news is at the leasing office door. What the team says in the first ten minutes often determines what the community reads the next day. Most teams, he said, have never been trained for that moment. In Texas, one-party consent law means any resident can record a conversation without disclosing it. His rule was simple. Every resident is a prospective reporter.
The cost of the bare-minimum response is rising. A corporate attorney McKissack once heard said directly: if a property ends up in court and the answer to what it did is “what we were required to do,” bring your checkbook. Juries reward ownership, not compliance. He contrasted that with a case in which a maintenance crew entered the wrong apartment and discarded a resident’s belongings, some of which had been urinated on by dogs in the dumpster. Management refused to reimburse and declined to comment. The story went to the news. A public apology, a couple of months of free rent, and a clear response would have rewritten the narrative entirely.
McKissack closed with a four-part framework: prevention, preparation, response, and recovery. Prevention means identifying the three most persistent issues on any property, whether maintenance, crime, parking, or trash, and addressing them before they grow. Preparation is the playbook, built and rehearsed before it is needed. Response is what the team says and does in the first ten minutes of any incident. Recovery is the documentation and follow-through that restore the narrative. Safer properties produce happier residents, who in turn drive reviews, referrals, and occupancy. That entire chain, McKissack reminded the room, begins not with hindsight, but with foresight.