In order the get a job in apartment management, you need to be certified. There are online courses, as well as courses through your local colleges which you need to take. Some of these courses include property maintenance, and fair housing studies, as well as some accounting. You don't have to have a college degree in order to get your certification however, but it may help.
If you are interested in management jobs of this type, you also need to have some experience to get apartment manager jobs. While you are studying, you should find work in apartment maintenance, customer service, or even as some kind of leasing agent. You will need at least one year of experience, and you can do this while you are taking the courses you will need.
There are also other skills you will need, ones that you can't take a course on. One of these is good communication skills. You have to be able to talk to people in a friendly manner, no matter how rude they may be to you. This also means good people skills, and keeping your head, even in a crisis. Not everyone is able to do this, and it takes practice. You also have to be able to analyze situations, assess problems, and solve them in a timely manner.
Management jobs also require a degree of self restraint. You are always going to run into some kind of problem in manager jobs, whether it is a tenant who is always late on their rent, or a maintenance person who doesn't get their work done properly. No matter what, you can't get angry, and you have to be able to do hard things, like firings and evictions.
There are also a few other things to note if you are interested in this kind of work. One of them is that people are not always going to like you, especially when it comes down to having to evict or fire them. It is stressful, and while some apartment managers make a lot of money, they also work extremely long hours. If you think that being an apartment manager is just like any other 9-5 job, it isn't.
For one thing, you are always on call, day or night. If an emergency comes up at the apartment, you are the first person a tenant is going to call, even in the middle of the night. If you happen to live in the same apartment complex that you work at, you are also going to have to deal with tenants on an every day basis, and there will always be someone coming up to you with a problem or complaint, not matter is you are 'working' or not.
This doesn't mean that an apartment manager isn't a good field to get into. Some people work in this business for years and would never do anything else. This is just to let you know the kinds of things you can expect.
