Before Lindsay Colbert goes on a trip, she puts together an extremely detailed itinerary. For a pre-pandemic trip to Croatia and Montenegro, she noted wake-up times for each day, driving times to destinations like Plitvice Lakes National Park, and what to see and exactly how much time to spend at each destination. “My boyfriend and I love to travel to places we’ve never been before, so I do a lot of research and craft our agenda to get in as many unique experiences as possible,” says the chief operating officer of Presidium.
Multifamily Executive’s 2020 Rising Star applies that intense organization and attention to detail to improving Presidium, a vertically integrated real estate company in Texas. Rising through the ranks from construction project manager to COO in just three short years, Colbert is in charge of improving operations as well as building a supportive culture at the company, which was recently named one of the 250 Most Inspiring Companies in Texas by Inc. magazine.
Presidium’s current portfolio is worth $2 billion and includes 13,000 apartment units. Seven years ago, it was considerably smaller: It was worth $300 million and had 4,500 units. But the company saw the potential in renovating aging ’60s and ’70s properties and repositioning them as leaders in their markets. In 2013, it brought on Colbert to manage its first full-scope renovation in Dallas, and things took off from there. Today, she oversees the 250-person property management and renovation teams, and also leads the company’s employee training and engagement efforts as well as marketing and PR.
“I really love this role,” says Colbert. “It was a big jump for me when I was offered the opportunity to revamp and formalize processes for the rest of the business. Whether it’s putting in place a new process in customer service that makes people really happy, or a physical home improvement that makes it a great place—I love to get to do that on a daily basis.”
Presidium’s co-CEO John Griggs credits Colbert for having a major hand in the company’s fast growth. “Under her leadership, she has doubled the size of the management team, bringing best-in-class personnel and processes to the company. Her efforts have also led to a highly successful renovation program that has completed over $100 million in property improvements. The net result of these choreographed management and construction programs have been outstanding, yielding over a 30% internal rate of return on projects Lindsay operated during her tenure.”
With three generations of real estate developers in her family, it’s not surprising that Colbert found a career in this industry. In 1949, her great-grandfather and grandfather developed one of the first shopping malls on the East Coast. Her father, Tim, took over the family business in Ithaca, N.Y., and expanded it by developing student housing, overseeing 2,500 units. Colbert’s mother, Mary Ann, was a leasing agent. At age 6, Colbert was walking jobsites with her dad, where she collected scraps of tile, wood, and other materials to create her own buildings. She also recalls drawing “blueprints” with markers on graph paper for her dad’s next project. She interned in the office while in high school, setting up model units and organizing photo shoots.
While she enjoyed the work, Colbert’s early ambition was to become an event planner. For senior prom, instead of making a restaurant reservation, she planned a dinner for 35 friends at her parents’ house. To make it glamorous as possible, she and her mother made a fancy appetizer, plating shrimp cocktail in individual glasses. Attending Cornell University’s renowned school of hotel administration to learn the hospitality business was an obvious next step. But after her first semester, she switched to real estate. “A lot of event planning happens on weekends and holidays, so it didn’t seem sustainable. I was worried about the lack of balance if I were to have a family,” says Colbert, who continues to be the person in her circle of friends to organize gatherings.
Looking for professional contacts, she reached out to the only female real estate developer in the school’s alumni directory: Caroline Perel, who was then a principal of Dallas-based Juno Development. During an informational interview, Colbert learned that Juno, which renovated and rebranded hotels for companies like Marriott and Hyatt, was hiring. “These big hotels are successful for a reason—there’s a lot of benefits to consistency, including huge efficiencies on the operating side. It piqued my interest,” she says. She moved to Dallas to take the position of business analyst, where she learned about the hotels’ very detailed design and operating guidelines, developed line-by-line budgets for renovations, and created investor pitch books for multimillion-dollar hotel investments.
A year and a half into this first job, a friend of a friend connected Colbert with the owners of Presidium, who were gearing up for the full renovation of an East Dallas apartment complex. Though Colbert had never managed a construction project on her own, she had some insight into the complex process and had worked with various design and construction teams at Juno. She signed on with Presidium and took the property from C class to B+ class, which involved renovating all 280 individual units, exteriors, and common areas, constructing a new leasing office, and installing a pool. Over the next couple of years, Colbert built up Presidium’s renovation business, hiring 13 staffers and standardizing the capital improvement program. The role of COO was created for her in 2016 so that she could apply that organizational analysis and bring structured procedures to the property management team and the rest of the company.
One of the first steps she took after becoming COO was to streamline the budget process, a dreaded yearly task. “Teams would sit in a room with their laptops and go through their spreadsheets line by line—it was as miserable as it sounds,” she says. By creating a budget workbook that automated certain aspects, reducing the amount of human input as well as the chance for error, Colbert cut the amount of time to get budgets done and approved by about half. More recently, she’s been working to keep employee spirits up during the pandemic shutdown, promoting health and wellness tips on the company’s internal Facebook page.
“She’s incredibly thoughtful and a millennial in the best way possible—she recognizes that we have lives outside of our work and works to nurture us as whole people,” says Katie Lynn, vice president of design at Presidium, who has worked with Colbert for the past nine years. “She’s the kind of person that makes you want to continue working for her.”
