What the 79% actually said
· 2 min read
The number that gets quoted is 79%. In the National Apartment Association’s 2024 Voice of the Property Manager survey, that share of respondents said the job had negatively affected their mental health.
Underneath the headline sits a ranked list of causes, and it says something different from what most people assume.
Abuse ranks above workload
Asked to name their single biggest challenge, the largest group at 22% said dealing with aggressive and abusive residents. The second largest, at 16.3%, said they can’t switch off after hours. Staffing came third.
Both of the top two answers describe exposure rather than volume. Being the person who absorbs the anger, and then being the person who can’t put it down at six o’clock because the phone is the same phone.
Why that changes the response
Read the 79% as a workload problem and the obvious response is to hire, which runs straight into the fact that you can’t.
Read it as an exposure problem and a different set of options opens up, most of them cheaper. A resident who can see that their issue was logged, assigned and scheduled arrives at the office a good deal calmer than one who has been told “I’ll look into it” three times. A manager who isn’t personally holding the state of forty open items has less to be woken up about.
Both of those come from the information living somewhere other than one person’s memory. That is a change to how the work is tracked, not a wellness programme.
What turnover costs
Turnover in property management runs around 33%, more than ten points above the national average across other industries, and average tenure sits near nineteen months.
That figure gets misquoted often enough to be worth stating carefully: 33% is the turnover rate. Burnout is what the 79% describes, and turnover is one of the things it produces.
The Work Institute puts the total cost of losing an employee at roughly a third of their base salary once you count both replacement and the productivity gap around it. Against a median in the mid-sixties, that is somewhere north of twenty thousand dollars every time someone leaves, before you count what they knew that nobody wrote down.
What walks out with them
That last cost is the one directors of operations feel hardest, and the one most open to being fixed.
When a manager leaves, what they knew about their buildings goes too. Which contractor is reliable. What was tried in 2023. Why the north stairwell gets checked twice. The replacement starts from an inbox and a filing cabinet, and spends six months rediscovering things that were never written down, because the person who knew them never needed to write them down.
A record that lives outside one person’s head will not fix burnout. It does turn a departure into a handover, which is roughly the difference between a hard quarter and a hard year.