Multifamily Investing With Impact: Peter Slough and Jenny Romera, Real Finds Podcast #52 Transcript
Peter Slough: During the last downturn, the economy was faltering, jobs were scarce, and residents were suffering. We stumbled into impact, because we didn’t know what those words were. We didn’t know what impact was, or ESG, or anything like that. We just asked the simple question: how do we help? We set out on this grand social experiment, stepped back, and looked at what we could do for our residents, providing services to address resiliency and financial vulnerabilities. We had no financial agenda with this approach, but after nine months, this one property was gushing cash.
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast that interviews key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping real estate and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we speak with Peter Slough and Jenny Romera. Peter is founder and managing partner at OpenPath Investments, a multifamily impact investment firm founded in 2005. Jenny is president of New Earth Residential, a management firm focused on driving investment returns by supporting thriving communities. Working together, OpenPath Investments and New Earth Residential have amassed a portfolio across seventeen states. We discuss the state of multifamily, effective multifamily management, and impact investing for financial success. It’s well worth a listen. Peter and Jenny, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Peter Slough: You bet. Thanks for the opportunity.
Gordon Lamphere: Before we start, why real estate?
Peter Slough: I’ve been in real estate since my teens, coming from a real estate family on the residential side. I hopped into commercial in 1997 as a lender for GMAC Commercial Mortgage, placing debt and equity on all asset classes, and found myself gravitating toward multifamily as my specialty. We started OpenPath almost twenty years ago; 2025 will be our twentieth anniversary. We started New Earth Residential, the property management company, five years ago with the idea of putting impact first in our mission and making sure we looked after residents as much as we looked after financials. Jenny runs the property management company, and we approach the industry as almost impact as a service. That’s been beneficial for aligning our goals and putting a resident-first approach back into the business.
Stumbling Into Impact
Gordon Lamphere: What drove you to focus on impact as a service? That’s not what commercial real estate investors typically see when they look at a management company.
Peter Slough: I was classically trained with spreadsheets and what I’ll call two-dimensional thinking, strictly numbers and values. In 2009, during the last downturn, the economy was faltering, jobs were scarce, and residents were suffering. We stumbled into impact because we didn’t know the words. We just asked, how do we help? We had a lot of communities in Salt Lake City specifically, and I realized pretty quickly that if our residents were suffering, the whole business thesis would falter. So we set out on this grand social experiment to see what we could do for residents and provide services addressing resiliency and financial vulnerability. We had no financial agenda, but after nine months, this one property was gushing cash, which was unexpected. Rents were flat, yet expenses were declining rapidly. Less turnover, less marketing, fewer countertops, carpet, and paint, all the replacement costs you incur, because we had a stable community at a hundred percent occupancy.
Gordon Lamphere: When people think of amenities, they think of a pool or a gym. What are the amenities that actually drive resilience?
Peter Slough: It’s less tangible and more intangible. It’s programming and social support. We’ve developed four pillars of impact: building community, developing leaders, channeling resources, and enhancing the property environment. Building community through events is paramount to creating social glue. But we really look at channeling resources: what can we bring from outside the community into the property to support financial fitness, mental health and well-being, and connectivity? One of our big goals for a couple of years has been what I call net zero rents. If a resident is paying $800 to $1,250 a month, we look for goods and resources from outside the property to help lower their cost of living. It’s a big goal, but we’re chipping away at it methodically.
Gordon Lamphere: What kind of services are you bringing in?
Jenny Romera: One we added in the last thirty days is Lasagna Love, where we can log in and order a lasagna dinner for any family in our community, and residents can do it for themselves or for someone they know in need. Another is Sleep in Heavenly Peace, which provides free mattresses for residents in need. We try to find national partnerships as well as local ones. Another is Waterford, online schooling to prep kids for kindergarten, and if they don’t have internet or a computer, they’ll help provide that. I could go through a whole list, but all of them better residents’ lives and take a little pressure off their shoulders, because inflation is hurting all of them. We also focus on food resources. In Las Vegas, we have the Just One Project, which provides a hundred dollars a month in free food and delivers it to the communities.
Gordon Lamphere: How do you go about reaching out and getting these services into your buildings?
Jenny Romera: Included in our management fee is our Urban Village program. I have five full-time team members whose job is channeling resources to the communities, because the on-site team is never going to have time to find them. They need to be collecting rent, leasing apartments, talking with residents, inspecting units, and doing day-to-day operations. It’s part of our management fee, at no additional cost to clients.
Peter Slough: We’ve also created an online resident hub that spells out, by state and market, what resources are available, and getting that in front of residents has been really beneficial. We’ve had mobile dental units roll through and provide checkups, haircuts, vaccines. We’re trying to serve residents by bringing goods and services to them.
Gordon Lamphere: What does a typical resident look like in your buildings? I’m guessing it’s not the top income earners.
Peter Slough: We have Class C to Class A properties, especially with New Earth Residential, which serves other operators too, so it’s a broad range. It could be blue collar or residents of lesser means financially, affordable and low-income housing, but we also have Class A. What’s been successful is that we don’t take a top-down approach where we think we know best. We let residents inform us, depending on their demographic, what goods, services, and events matter most to them.
Jenny Romera: It really doesn’t matter the class of product. There’s always going to be somebody who needs assistance. We have a program with NAMI, mental health services that are free for residents. And there are residents who want to give back. We have communities with a lot of engineers who do monthly math tutoring for residents in the neighborhood. We cater the program to each community and what’s most effective for them.
What Resilience Looks Like
Gordon Lamphere: What are you seeing from your effort to create more resilient buildings?
Jenny Romera: We show residents how much we care about them, and in return, they care about living in the community and taking care of it. In summer, when kids are out of school and there’s more busyness around the community, when they know we care about them and the community, instead of kicking in the rain gutters and doing what kids do, we’ve seen a definite decrease in that at the communities we manage.
Peter Slough: There’s a lot to borrow from hospitality. A good hotel looks after its customers if it expects them to return. The same thought pattern flows to multifamily: take care of your residents, treat them with dignity, and you have a stickier community, more referrals, potentially waitlists. Engaging residents and making them our priority as a customer-service-driven business has been an element of our secret sauce.
Gordon Lamphere: There’s always a balance between providing services and what you get back. How does that balance play out between financial goals, investors, and the management company?
Peter Slough: I could argue all day that impact is a necessary ingredient if you want to hit your financial returns. Borrowing from hospitality, it’s just good business. If you’re not tackling these issues, eventually the wheels come off. You need a resilient community to balance your financial thesis. I’ve found no conflict. Yes, we have higher overhead at the management company with additional staff, but that’s the cost of doing business, and if you want to be successful, it’s an important part to consider.
Gordon Lamphere: How would you define impact investing in real estate for someone less familiar?
Peter Slough: Taking the approach that social and environmental returns are equally important to financial returns. That’s impact investing: reinvesting money and resources back into your property in order to achieve financial goals. The two go hand in hand.
Finding Deals and Scaling the Model
Gordon Lamphere: When you’re looking for properties to deploy these practices, what does a good deal look like, and where are you looking to deploy the management company?
Peter Slough: From the management side, you’re looking for a physical plant with good bones. It doesn’t need Class A amenities, just good gathering spaces, in markets with job and population growth for supply and demand reasons. But impact is needed everywhere. It’s about where clients are buying assets, and then we layer in our approach to management, impact as a service. It started with OpenPath’s mission in 2009, but OpenPath is a small-to-midsize player with about a billion dollars in multifamily. Jenny has taken the company to represent not just OpenPath but third-party clients, so we’re able to scale our mission through New Earth Residential and touch other people’s lives across the industry.
Gordon Lamphere: Jenny, how has the scaling process worked, and what are the key factors?
Jenny Romera: We’ve really grown off referrals. We’re in fifteen states right now, with two more probably by the end of the year. We’ve catered everything to what’s best for each individual community and asset, and that lets us grow off referrals, because we can manage a property in a market we haven’t been in before, or just one community in a market, deliver the impact, grow the NOI, and meet our clients’ goals and our impact goals. That leads to them buying additional communities or changing management on others.
Gordon Lamphere: Stepping back to broader multifamily, what trends are you seeing generally?
Peter Slough: Within multifamily, the industry is starting to pay attention to how we address social and environmental impact, which is a nice tailwind for us, since we’ve been doing it for fifteen years. We’re realizing as an industry how important our residents are, for all kinds of reasons. When I see lenders, large institutional players, and owners stepping into the conversation, we’re starting to cross-collaborate and share best practices, which validates what we’ve been up to. That’s a pretty recent trend, the last year or two, and I feel somewhat vindicated. This is a three-dimensional model, not just spreadsheets. We’re sitting on the fifty-yard line of renter-household America, and there’s a lot of opportunity to explore. One of our challenges has been taking on too much, so we’ve refined our strategy and our target impact goals to the top five rather than the top twenty. Scaling programs across the country has always been a challenge, and refining what we focus on is important.
Gordon Lamphere: What are the pitfalls? Where is impact investing less efficient?
Peter Slough: We can come up with all kinds of programs, and resident engagement is the key challenge. You can lead a horse to water. In a lot of cases we bring in great programming and it goes unattended or unused. Getting residents to actually engage is what we’ll continue to work on.
Gordon Lamphere: So many landlords listening are looking for tenant engagement. How does your surveying and engagement process work?
Jenny Romera: After we take over a community, we wait about thirty days for the site to be ready for the Urban Village program, which gives the manager, leasing team, and service team time to meet the residents and learn the ins and outs of the community. Then we do an Urban Village launch. The impact coordinator for that community, and each coordinator has about fifteen properties, goes to the site and launches the program with the team members first, so they get a good introduction and any new team members learn about the program. The coordinator talks with the site team about what they feel the community needs, whether resident events or something environmental like gardens or beehives, going through the four pillars. Then we survey the residents for their feedback, get everyone aligned, and go full force on channeling resources and holding events residents actually want to attend. Each quarter we do a call with the team to make sure we’re going the right direction and residents are using the services, and pivot as needed. Clients also get a quarterly impact report with their financial statements.
Migration, Collections, and Site Teams
Gordon Lamphere: One of the biggest shifts in multifamily has been migration patterns. What are you seeing across fifteen, soon seventeen, states?
Jenny Romera: On the leasing side, when we go through our CRM, people are not moving within the same state. They’re moving from another state, whether to downtown Salt Lake City or suburban Denver. There’s been a decrease in local traffic and more from other states. People are moving further than they used to.
Gordon Lamphere: Is there a certain demographic, or is it across the board?
Jenny Romera: I could tell you a few states, but everybody probably already knows. A lot of people from California. It’s a mix of where they’re going, and we’d need to dive into the data further. We really focus on what each community needs and what maximizes NOI. I will say that for several years during COVID, the site teams were collection agencies. Over the last year or so, there’s been a shift back to leasing. The Urban Village services help residents who may be frustrated with bills they couldn’t pay during COVID or challenges with inflation. It takes the edge off. They’re nicer, they like the site team, they appreciate them. Regardless of where anybody’s moving from, I see that making a big difference, and our site teams are happier because the residents treat them well.
Gordon Lamphere: We love talking about hiring and maximizing your team. What’s the biggest thing you look for in a site team hire?
Jenny Romera: Attitude is everything. We want people who are passionate to be there, who care about impact, the residents, and the community, and for whom it’s not just a job. There’s career growth and lots of ongoing opportunity, because even though you might think AI can take over some things, you still need real people in property management.
Gordon Lamphere: Having someone who walks a building and spots things is absolutely critical. How do you find individuals who are particularly interested in impact?
Jenny Romera: Referrals. Whether for new clients or team members, we want people who are aligned and rowing in the same direction. Our current team members are engaged in the program and see the difference, and that lets us add new team members who are aligned. A lot of them have heard about it because a friend or family member works for us.
Peter Slough: We have a unique culture within New Earth Residential and OpenPath. It’s about being mission-aligned and part of something bigger than yourself, purpose-driven. That’s a big factor in attracting talent, because most people are more fulfilled when they’re part of something doing some good. The old guard of heads-on-beds, spreadsheet thinking has to go at some point. My hope is that someday impact is no longer a special word, it’s just good business, and we get away from trendy words suggesting you’re doing something unique. It’s inherent in our DNA, and I’d like to see that mission spread across the industry, which it already is.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s move to our Final Four. First, one of my favorites: where do you see multifamily going ten years out?
Peter Slough: I leaked my answer: impact won’t be anything special, just part of doing good business. The more we evolve toward really looking after residents, driving the net zero rent concept, channeling resources into the property, and making sure there’s resilience so residents not only survive but thrive, that’s a key differentiator, because a lot of our residents don’t have time to think outside the box. We’re trying to meet their needs at home.
Gordon Lamphere: Jenny, beyond impact investing, any other trends to watch?
Jenny Romera: Collections continue to improve, and Peter and I were just talking about rent growth in 2025. We’re moving forward on both in the near future.
Gordon Lamphere: A lot of younger investors listen, anyone under thirty or thirty-five starting out. What advice would you give yourself starting in the industry?
Peter Slough: Originally I was focused on the financial. I’d say get very clear about something that fulfills purpose and exemplifies your values, and pour yourself into it. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of behaving that way, but if you can start with what fills your heart, I think the financial follows.
Jenny Romera: One thing we haven’t talked about is that site teams need support more than ever. Look for a management company that isn’t giving its regional managers twelve or fifteen properties, because with the workforce changing, teams need a lot more support and attention than before. Make sure you’re with a company aligned with that, so your asset gets attention.
Gordon Lamphere: Why is that particularly important?
Jenny Romera: The workforce has changed so much. As the support team to the site team, showing that you care and are there to help is critical. People will leave at the end of day one if they feel they’ve just been handed keys and thrown into the asset. We want team members to stay, be aligned, and make a difference. Residents get attached to team members. The more the regional managers or MVPs can go to the site, show support, see the pain points, and strategize on fixing them, the bigger the difference.
Gordon Lamphere: We love talking about books that make a difference. Jenny or Peter, is there one you’d share?
Peter Slough: I’m a big fan of The Second Mountain by David Brooks. We spend much of our early career striving after the material and the financial, and in reality, getting to your second mountain, where you’re purpose-based and driven by something greater than yourself, is the big message for how you conduct yourself professionally and personally.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s one of the whole reasons for this podcast, talking about more interesting facets of real estate than the spreadsheet. Jenny?
Jenny Romera: The latest one I read with the team, site teams and support team together, is The Energy Bus, a great book for morale and looking at the right side of things. And any book about hospitality transfers over to multifamily. Crucial Conversations and Unreasonable Hospitality are both really good.
Gordon Lamphere: Unreasonable Hospitality is phenomenal. Anybody in office, industrial, flex, or multifamily, please go read it. It’s essential for anyone remotely in the service industry. Now, the whole reason for the podcast: we reach out to the men and women in the arena for insight into who we should talk to next. Do either of you have a suggestion?
Peter Slough: Try to get hold of Bob Simpson. He formed the Multifamily Impact Council, a council of all the players in the ecosystem, from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to the larger owner-operators, insurance companies, and lenders. We’re all banding together, and we’re an early member, to collaborate and open-source what best practices could be.
Gordon Lamphere: One final question: if someone wants to reach out to either of you, what’s the best way?
Jenny Romera: My direct number is 801-450-4951, or email me at [email protected].
Peter Slough: I can be reached at [email protected].
Gordon Lamphere: Jenny and Peter, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast. We truly appreciate it, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Peter Slough: Thanks for having us.
Jenny Romera: Thank you so much.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Peter and Jenny. We appreciate their insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to provide quality guests. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
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