A Deep Heart for HAA

Whatever she touches is left better than she found it. Learn about how the 2022 HAA President Christy Rodriguez got to where she is in her career and how she has raised a beautiful family along the way.

By Morgan Taylor, HAA Staff Portrait by Mark Hiebert, Hiebert Photography

The Houston Apartment Association’s 2022 President Christy Rodriguez is a versatile multifamily real estate executive with a firm commitment to excellence. She is the director of real estate for Judwin Properties, a leading family-owned apartment management company based here in Houston that has been in operation for 58 years.

She pours her heart into what she believes in and has the power to influence positive change in companies, projects and people. And she uses that power often. As many of her own mentors have said, it’s her versatility that makes her a great teammate and leader.

“Christy is incredibly dedicated to the industry and association. She is a tenacious professional, always striving to be the best and outperform previous records,” HAA CEO Casey Morgan said.

Over the last couple of years, Rodriguez has been largely influential in helping HAA navigate the disruptive changes brought on by the pandemic for the organization to best serve its members. “I enjoy working with Christy because she understands the big picture. She’s not easily distracted with minor challenges as long as we remain focused on our mission – what really matter to members. She is able to prioritize and create goaloriented tasks so that we achieve real results for the membership,” Morgan said.

As a versatile leader, Rodriguez can be counted on in any critical situation to succeed and she can manage competing priorities. As a Harvard Business Review article titled “The Best Leaders Are Versatile Ones” reads, the last couple of years have amplified the need for versatile leaders, because versatility allows leaders to read and respond to change. This couldn’t be truer for HAA’s 2022 president.

“To me, her value is that she can do anything. If you put her in front of anything, you can have the confidence that she’s going to lead it and succeed,” 2020 HAA Past President Clay Hicks, and president of The Dinerstein Companies, said.

During a financially distressing time for most organizations, Rodriguez was instrumental in navigating HAA’s financial health as the organization’s secretary/treasurer in 2020. In the words of HAA Immediate Past President John Boriack, it was a monumental task.

“I was fortunate to have her as treasurer during my presidency because HAA’sPhoto at left and above: Christy through her childhood. finances were, of course, a huge challenge during COVID-19. All I had to do was The “Big Three” 2021 President John ask her to dig into the financials to help me figure out what was going on. She Boriack, 2022 President Christy Rodriguez went above and beyond in determining HAA’s financial health and in figuring outand 2020 President Clay Hicks. Christy with her family, son David, what we had so that we could make big decisions off information that we underdaughter Marissa and husband David. stood,” Hicks said.

Rodriguez assisted HAA through a technical challenge created by the pandemic, but she was also a much-needed encouraging voice to the HAA staff during her time serving on the HAA Executive Committee in 2020 as secretary/ treasurer and in 2021 as president-elect. Although Rodriguez is truly a force characterized by curiosity and discipline, she is also extremely extroverted, kind, thoughtful, positive and fun. It’s the culmination of these traits that make her sparkle when she speaks or even when she enters a room. It’s what has made her a standout in her career and in her association involvement.

“On a personal level, Christy is one of the most approachable people I’ve met in a professional environment. She never meets a stranger and is very inclusive. Christy can light up any room –even if it’s a room full of members working on not-so-riveting material, like the budget or our financials,” Morgan said.

Everyone who meets Rodriguez sees that sparkle almost immediately. Many joke, such as Hicks, that her being really good at her job is a bonus.

“Her positivity is what causes her to standout, like she immediately did at Greystar. She carved her own path within our company and made a name for herself,” Mack Armstrong, a senior managing director for Greystar and HAA’s 2013 president, said.

Over the course of her career, she has cultivated a wide repertoire of skills, which is what has propelled her career growth in an industry that demands it.

“Christy’s talent that has created such career growth is her versatility,” Jenifer Paneral, 2012 HAA president and senior vice president of operations for DayRise Residential, said.

As author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Angela Duckworth says, talent, though, never happens overnight. Talent is developed over time, through hard work, practice and unwavering commitment. It’s no surprise that Rodriguez began developing the artistry of being well-rounded long before her career in multifamily real estate. In school, she was an overachiever in every way. She excelled in both academics and various extra curriculars.

She was a member of the National Honors Society, the Spanish Honors Society and Mu Alpha Theta (the honor society for mathematics) in high school. On top of her academic achievements, Rodriguez was a talented clarinet player. As if that wasn’t enough, she was also the drum major in the La Porte High School marching band and performed for the annual musical production in the pit orchestra.

Her clarinet mastery brought her to study music performance at San Jacinto Community College, where she placed First Chair Symphonic Clarinet in the Texas Music Education Association All-State Band.

At San Jacinto, Rodriguez met her husband, David, who was a bass player. While in school, Rodriguez picked up a part-time job at an apartment community where she would quickly become the property manager. Even though she had plans to pursue a career in music performance, she was thinking about the future when she made the decision to go after a career in the apartment industry.

“Here I am in the apartment industry, making the salary of a teacher, and there’s a ton of opportunity in this business to grow. I would get the ABODE magazine and see women like Eileen Subinsky (HAA’s 1998 president), Kathy Clem (HAA’s 2003 president) and Darlene Guidry (HAA’s 2004 president) on the cover. I thought, these are women who are leading. I could do this,” Rodriguez said.

While there was scarcity in jobs at the top for female leaders in business then, seeing women in leadership positions within the apartment business inspired Rodriguez.

Rodriguez never sacrificed her family life for success. She has overcome the stereotype about women having to choose between their families or careers. When asked what she admires most about Rodriguez, Paneral said it’s her commitment to her family. In fact, her commitment to her family helped shape her career path.

With a toddler at home and a baby on the way, David went back to school to pursue a career change for the betterment of their amily’s future. So, Rodriguez did what any wife and mother working in multifamily property management would do to support her family. She negotiated a free apartment to work onsite for Alliance Residential Management during a time when free apartments for property managers were hard to find. David went to school at night for engineering and design graphics so that he could be at home with their young children during the day while Christy worked and vice versa. It was hard work, but it paid off. Today, David works for a global oil and gas organization using the skills he learned and developed when he went back to school.

At Alliance Residential, Rodriguez’s career really started to flourish working under Paneral. Through Rodriguez’s story, you will see how she aligned herself with the best in their crafts to be the successful, dynamic leader she is today without ever sacrificing family.

First, I want to start by asking you how you were able to develop the artistry of being so well rounded?

I’m deeply curious about people and problems. I’m also really competitive with myself. I learned along the way that every person possesses strengths on any team. There is always going to be someone wiser and more experienced than you on any team. Those are the people I always try to lean into. I also like to work with leaders and owners who are different than me to create a balanced team in order to accomplish the goal.

Alliance Residential Management wasn’t your first job in the industry, but it was the first time you were exposed to people who would later become HAA leaders, such as Paneral and Suan Tinsley (a partner of Houston’s DayRise Residential). Jerry believes you learned a lot from Paneral about operations, when in fact, Paneral said she learned a lot from you. There, you started as an onsite property manager. You were promoted to a dual-site property manager, then to a regional director of marketing and then again to a regional director of operations. What did you learn working with Paneral at Alliance Residential?

Jenifer and I are opposite, but we worked together as yin and yang. Her approach to operations is analytical and data driven. I tend to be quicker with my decision making, often referencing my past experiences to help me come to a decision. Jenifer would encourage me to slow down and utilize the data to help guide my decisions. I’ve always been a numbers nerd, but once I started understanding –and she helped influence this – the relationship between the operation and the numbers, it took my craft to a whole new level. We respected each other for our strengths so much because we saw in each other the abilities that we didn’t possess within ourselves.

Paneral said you took a massive and challenging 1,000-unit property and completely turned it around. At the time, you were a regional director of marketing, but you went onsite and did an excellent job, she said. “That was the first project I worked with her on where I was able to really see how talented she was at identifying what it took to lease, market and reposition a property” Paneral said. Were you surprised to go back onsite?

Honestly, no. I'm a team player. I'm going to do what I need to do, right? If my leader says this is what I need to do, I'm going to do it. It was a great opportunity to understand where the core of our business lied.

Tell me about your transition to Apartments.com and then back to the operations side.

At the time, there was a lot of change happening at Alliance. I started thinking about what I wanted out of my career, what I wanted in a job and what I wanted in a company. I had young kids in elementary school. They were starting to get active in soccer, they needed help with their homework and the weekends were getting busier. I wanted the flexibility to work remotely to be more available for them. When the opportunity to work for Apartments.com came up, I wasn’t sure if I could take the financial risk at the time, but I loved leasing and marketing. I ended up loving working for Apartments.com. It was innovative, it was fun, it was fresh, and I ended up doing really well in sales for the company. It was a blast, and I was able to have the flexibility I wanted for my children. I was able to cook breakfast for my kids every morning. We lived in a cul-de-sac – kids in the neighborhood would come over for breakfast, too.

Then the 2008 recession started happening, everybody was cutting marketing and my pay was being impacted. That’s when I reconnected with Jenifer Paneral and discovered there was an open position at Concierge. I knew I could really elevate the customer experience after experiencing it from the lens of the supplier and I knew I could be a standout in the submarket for these operations.

Following Concierge, you went to work for Greystar. Tell me about going from a company that did a lot of value add to a third-party management company – the largest in the United States.

The decision to go work for Greystar was a move towards growth. I had a deep love for my team at Concierge, for Jenifer, for the company itself and I believed in what we were doing, but ultimately, I wanted to grow and experience what it was like to work for a global organization. I knew I was in the prime of my career and that if I wanted to give my career my all, I had to make that leap. It goes back to what my parents taught me growing up – if you don't try, you're never going to succeed. I am thankful for my experience at Greystar, and I am privileged to have learned from so many industry leaders during my tenure there.

Shifting to your HAA involvement, once you graduated from the HAA Leadership Lyceum program, your association ascension really started, but your biggest and most influential contribution to HAA was your role as secretary/treasurer. You were integral in Morgan’s transition as CEO of HAA with your extensive knowledge of the budget and financials. Tell me about that role.

When Michelle Pawelek (a managing director for Greystar and the 2018 HAA President) called me to tell me I was going to be secretary/treasurer, I was so excited. Fast forward a few months later and COVID-19 happens. The first board meeting of the year, Jackie Rhone (an executive director for Greystar) says, “Madam secretary, have you considered revising the budget?” I worked with her closely on the owned assets at Greystar – all she did was ask the question and I knew I needed to dig in. From that point, I just immersed myself into HAA’s financials. When Clay asked me to chair the HAA COVID-19 Taskforce, I knew it would be a great opportunity to marry the two. I have a deep heart for this association. I accredit this association to my success. The relationships I have built here have really catapulted me in my career. I knew I had the skillset and the aptitude to take on these roles, and, by the way, I work for the Winograd family. Dr. (Eugene) Winograd is a past president (served in 1975) and Jerry (Winograd) is a past president (served in 2006). I felt like I owed it to them to give it my all – to do my best. I owed it to the HAA staff, too, to do what I could. Simultaneously, at Judwin, we were going through the same thing. Many of our processes were not digitized when the pandemic happened.

That’s right. Once you started with Judwin, just six months later Texas went on lockdown to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Shortly after, the HAA COVID-19 Taskforce was formed. As chair, that was a huge responsibility, but your current owner, Jerry Winograd, was supportive of that commitment. He said you were laying the groundwork for the industry. Tell me about your new role with Judwin and how it shifted during COVID-19.

When you’re in the trenches, you just take it one day at a time. I’m reading a book called Leading Change by John Kotter. He says there’s survival mode and then there’s thrive mode. For me, thriving was bringing joy. Where can we find the wins? Where can we make progress? We can’t control what we can’t control, but we can support people in this crazy time – and that’s what I did. My journey at Judwin was serendipitous, I always say, because I didn’t want to make any changes within my first couple of months at Judwin but the pandemic demanded we do exactly the opposite. When I joined the Judwin team, I was just trying to learn how they did things. I was, however, setting the framework with the Winograds to automate and digitize our operations in those first few months. We would talk about online leasing, transitioning to paperless, what tools we already had, what we would need. I’m big on project teams – getting everyone together and talking through things. I wanted to understand it all. When the pandemic happened, we had to be able to operate with the doors closed. People needed to be able to lease, pay and tour online. There was a huge push to get Judwin online simultaneously with everything that was going on at HAA.

I’m fascinated by your ability to navigate so many challenges at once. How were you able to juggle all of that at once?

I’m always looking for people’s strengths. I am keenly aware of what my strengths are and aren’t. When it comes to an initiative or a problem, I look at it as, what skillsets do we need to accomplish the goal? First, you establish what that the goal or problem is, and then you establish who possesses those skillsets. How can I pair people and put them in project teams to make it happen, do it quickly and make people feel good about it? I use my energy to motivate others, to inspire others, to help them see things they don't see within themselves that I can see and identify. When it comes to weaknesses, I try to apply the “Whale Done Approach” – it’s a book by Ken Blanchard. They studied the whales at SeaWorld to identify how they got them to perform. Basically, both whales and people perform better when you reinforce the positive. When people are operating within their strengths, they're happy, they care, they're productive and they feel fulfilled.

How did your involvement in extra curriculars in school prepare you to be so well-rounded in your career and in HAA?

I learned a lot of skills in band, as drum major, and in every club. Band is a lot like being on a sports team – talk about teamwork and discipline. You learn teamwork and how to be a team player, you learn discipline, you learn how to listen, you learn how to work with different personalities.

Growing up, your parents really shaped you into who you are today, but there was always something missing, right? Tell me about finding your biological dad. Did you find where you got your sparkle from?

My parents divorced when I was really young. I was raised by my stepdad, who's the person I call dad to this day. He made sure that my sister and I did our school studies, that we were respectful and put education at the top of our list of priorities. My mom was giving, caring, soft spoken and introverted. My dad was not super introverted, but he wasn’t necessarily an extrovert, either. Meanwhile, I was literally born with this super extroverted personality. Fast forward to today. About three years ago, I found my biological father through Ancestry.com. When I met him, it was like looking in a mirror. It has answered a lot of questions internally that I didn’t realize I was asking. It’s been so fulfilling to learn where I got some of my innate personality traits from. It’s been a really fun, crazy experience getting to know him and my sister, my brother and my five nieces and nephews. My dad will always be my dad, but it’s been such a gift and a bonus to meet my biological dad and all of these family members I didn’t know I had.

Tell me about your children! It sounds like your son David may follow in your real estate footsteps and your daughter Marissa sounds like a mini you.

Yes, David is 21, and he’s studying business administration and real estate finance development at the University of Texas – San Antonio. He’s a numbers person, like I am. He is the most caring, thoughtful and artistic person. He’s a musician, too. He’s just an amazing kid all around. He has a bright future ahead. My daughter Marissa is also just amazing. She’s the better version of me. She’s 18 years old, and she’s in CAP (Coordinated Admission Program) at the University of Texas – Tyler to get into the University of Texas – Austin. She’s pursuing health and society, but she already has an associate degree from her work in high school. She recently pledged Zeta Tau Alpha, too. She’s very genuine and kind. My children are the best of friends. It’s really the sweetest thing ever.

I’m always fascinated by women who do it all –who have a career and a family. You’ve often made career decisions based on what is best for your family. For the women who want to do both, how did you do it? How can women better support each other in the workplace?

It’s having a support system. My husband, my in laws and my mother have been a tremendous support system. My husband is my rock, my biggest cheerleader and he grounds me. He has been critical to my success. You have to give yourself grace, too. When you become a mother, your purpose becomes bigger than yourself. You have to make sacrifices. Family is first – family is everything. I’ve had really awesome mentors and managers who were in the business 20-30 years before me who told me if they could redo their time with their children, they would, because you’re not going to remember that report, but you’re going to remember missing their band concert. I decided I was going to be there for the things that matter most to them, always, and I won’t waver from that.

That was a big reason why I joined Judwin, to be with my family more. As women, we have to support each other and not feel guilty when we have to miss a meeting to be there for our family. I think women often feel like we have to prove ourselves for that "one seat" at the executive table. I believe all that does is pin women against one other. I firmly believe that we have to start recognizing the strengths in one another in a way where we can feel confident about saying to each other “You are so smart. You bring so much to the table. I'm proud of you.” We don’t have to compete with one another for that one spot at the table, right? Make two spots, make three spots.

In looking at 2022, would you agree HAA is still in a transition period as the organization continues to rebound from the pandemic?

Yes, for sure. With the new leadership combined with a pandemic, we’re still in this adaptation phase. We have a fresh new leader after 30 years who sees things completely different. So, we’re still adapting. We’re still growing and learning. For example, with meetings and events, we still don’t know what attendance is going to be like in 2022. We are all keenly aware that we aren’t through this yet. We are forever changed by the pandemic. It’s important we be open and honest with each other about what has changed. We have to constantly be open to the fact that this is the way things are now and be okay with that. We have to be okay with not really knowing what to expect, but we know that we have the best people with the best hearts who have great intentions and a great vision. We can lean on another to get through anything.

Join HAA in celebrating the installation of 2022 President Christy Rodriguez and the 2022 HAA Leadership for the Installation Gala on January 28. See Page 17 for all the details.