JoAnn Blaylock, who spent the past several years leading property management at Lennar Corp.'s multifamily division Quarterra, has joined a Texas firm in the role of president as plans for Quarterra's spinoff appear to be on hold.
Blaylock started this month as president of Birchstone Residential, the Coppell, Texas-based in-house property management arm of Ashcroft Capital, a multifamily investment firm led by founder and CEO Frank Roessler. Blaylock replaced David Deitz, who had served as Birchstone president since August 2020.
When an executive recruiter contacted Blaylock, who had been at Lennar's Quarterra and LMC for nearly a decade, about the position, she said the president position at Birchstone piqued her interest. "Birchstone represented an opportunity to take on a new challenge and help a growing company really define who they're going to be as they grow," Blaylock said in an interview.
She changed jobs as Lennar works to determine the future of Quarterra. In Lennar's 2024 proxy statement, it said that the successful spinoff of Quarterra was included in the performance criteria for determining executive bonuses. Now, there doesn't appear to be a definitive timeframe for such a move.
“There are no set dates for Quarterra to spin from Lennar at this time,” Doug Bober, president of Quarterra’s Emblem division, told CoStar.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report, Lennar posted a deficit of $50 million to its multifamily unit for 2023. Operating losses in Lennar's multifamily segment were $16 million in the first quarter of this year, an improvement over the $22 million loss it reported in the first quarter of 2023.
Quarterra did not respond to a request to comment for this article. Blaylock said she "left Quarterra in capable hands."
Experience in Growing Companies
Blaylock has more than three decades of experience in the multifamily industry. She launched Quarterra's property management company in 2014. Blaylock was also a longtime senior executive at JPI and worked as a senior managing director at apartment giant Greystar and Grand Campus Living, a student housing management firm acquired by Lincoln.
"What I have done for the majority of my career is start management companies or grow management companies," Blaylock said.
Ashcroft, whose portfolio contains nearly 14,000 apartments concentrated in the Sun Belt, launched Birchstone about four years ago to move management of its properties in-house and away from third-party providers. The creation of Birchstone has helped Ashcroft make its properties more valuable by providing unified and professional operations, Ashcroft's Roessler said.
"When you start off, you're not this big 400-pound gorilla, and you're working with... less institutional property management companies that have potentially scores of other clients pulling them in a million different directions," Roessler said in an interview.
The third-party management firms typically "don't have as much time to focus on the success of them as you would if you were overseeing them," he said.
When Ashcroft decided to find a new president for Birchstone, finding a proven executive was critical, Roessler said.
Plans To Expand
"We didn't want to mess around. We wanted to really go find someone who believed in our vision, but also was just an excellent leader in the industry," he said. Blaylock "was at the top of the list from the get-go," Roessler said, "and things worked out."
The addition of Blaylock will "position us for growth as markets recover and our unit count climbs north of 20,000 and beyond,” he said.
Blaylock broke into the apartment management business when she got a part-time job with a multifamily firm while a student at the University of North Texas in her hometown of Denton.
"Once I got into the industry, I was just hooked," she said. "The growth of my career, I guess, started at JPI. I started as a leasing professional and held most of the positions on site and through the corporate office, and finished my career there as the president of the management company. We had a little over 45,000 homes under management at that time."
Blaylock said her first couple of weeks at Birchstone have gone well as she gathers information and creates plans for expansion.
"We do want to be prepared and ready when the growth happens," she said.