CEO SECRETS
Leaders discuss how to navigate a situation like no other.
Camden Property Trust, named one of Houston’s Top Workplaces for four consecutive years, vaulted to No. 1 among large companies in 2020.
Employees of Camden, which builds, owns and manages apartments across the country, described their company as feeling like a family. But what happens when a family can no longer gather face-to-face? What is the responsibility to one another during a historic crisis? The Chronicle called the company’s chief executive, Ric Campo, to discuss workplace culture and Houston’s apartment market.
Q: What has been your approach to creating a healthy working environment during the pandemic?
A: We’re still work-athome for our administrative staff. The big issue we have today is people with kids. How do you go to work when you have kids going to school remotely? So, we have an educational assistance program where we’re helping employees either fund people (to help with childcare) or they’re staying at home and we’re continuing to pay people even if they can’t go to work.
The new normal is going to be amore distributed workforce. Will we have less office space? Probably not. Maybe instead of a big corporate facility in Greenway Plaza, we have an office in Sugar Land, we have an office in The Woodlands, we have an office in Clear Lake. And people who live in those areas work in those areas. It will allow us to give people more time back to their personal lives.
Q: Does your portfolio follow the national trend of rent collections falling?
A: Actually, no. We don’t see that in our portfolio and part of that is the customer base. The average income is above $100,000 and the average rent is about $1,500. Trust me, they’ve been negatively impacted, but if you think about the most vulnerable people out there — people who work in hotels, restaurants, retail, those are people who live in lower-priced apartments.
People really do worry about not right now, but six months from now. Because Disney just announced that they’re laying off 28,000 people. Airlines have a 70 percent reduction in travel. Hotels aren’t open.
This is why government is there. They need to deal with pandemics, they need to deal with recessions. They need to provide a safety net.
Q: Were you saying that’s a responsibility, to advocate for government action?
A: It’s the responsibility of business leaders to press political leaders to get something done.
Q: Has the recession affected your decisions on new projects?
A: We did pause our construction business starting in April. We’re restarting projects that we slowed down. My view is the housing business is going to be really good over the next two or three years. We’re leaning into that. We’re building asmuch as we can as fast as we can.
Maybe not somuch in Houston. There’s 20,000 units being delivered each year in Houston. So, you have a supply problem. Along with a demand problem — the demand problem is driven by energy. I think construction starts in Houston for multifamily are going to fall dramatically in the next year.