We Need Property Management
A solid wakeup call
The Masonic Temple in my town has been humming along, OK, for over a century now.
We are extremely lucky that the men who built it included a great deal of commercial and office space within the building, so we have always had a significant source of income to help pay the bills.
But, it isn’t enough. Our tenants are extremely loyal, one has been housed in our building for almost one hundred years, and are all good, stable businesses. It isn’t quite enough income for us though. We do our very best to keep the building up, and aren’t afraid to spend money to do so, but the income doesn’t allow us to properly repair everything, and time has slowly taken its toll.
Through the years we’ve talked from time to time about needing to get our leases and rents more in keeping with today’s times. We’ve also, from time to time, talked about, but never seriously considered hiring a property management company.
We’ve discussed things along those lines, but we’ve never really taken any steps in those directions.
I suppose this is because our situation isn’t anywhere close to dire. We’ve got money. It’s still in the top three of our little city’s best looking buildings. Our Treasurer does a great job with the books and government filings. We seem to have day to day operations nailed.
It just isn’t a disaster like so many Masonic buildings are.
But I think we’ve all known, for quite some time now, that things just aren’t quite right. That we could do better.
We move at the speed of Masonry. We put it off.
Recently we appointed a couple of young, new Masons to our Temple Board.
Those fellows sensed the same thing that all of us have been sensing, but they are younger, probably more energetic, and likely a bit more in tune with business in 2026.
They convinced us to hire a proper real estate attorney. A fellow who specializes in helping buildings like ours. Not a fellow from our little city where everyone knows everyone, but a fellow from urban Puget Sound.
Three of us, myself, our Temple Board President, and our Treasurer met with him a couple of days ago.
That meeting was extremely eye opening to me.
Mainly that hour was spent with him asking us questions about how we do things, us answering those questions, then him letting us know, in virtually every instance, just how far off our practices are from those practices considered the norm.
In a nutshell, we’ve been doing a lot of things incorrectly.
As a result of that, we’ve been leaving a lot of money on the table.
His bottom line, as he explained it, is that in his view we are renting out large commercial space as if we are renting out a single family home. That we are using rental house practices to rent out a commercial building.
I suppose that makes sense. Probably everyone on our board has either rented a home at some point, or let a home out to rent. It’s probably been that way just about forever. We certainly don’t have a commercial property developer on our Board, and I very much doubt that we have ever had a member in that line of work. So, we’ve managed it, for as long as anyone knows, based on our own residential experiences.
I don’t imagine that the process of modernizing our practices will be fast or easy. But, we can, and we must start taking steps. We owe it to the guys who built our building over a century ago.
The first thing that I’m going to push for is that we stop talking about it once in a great while, and that we actually hire a property management company.
Yes, that company will have fees, and we’ll have to pay those fees.
But, had we utilized a service like that long ago, the mistakes we made over the decades wouldn’t have been made, which would have resulted in more income. More than enough income to cover the cost of professional management.
I don’t know how many of our Lodges actually utilize property management companies to take care of these things, but I know that some do. My Lodge in Seattle also has significant commercial (and residential) space, and it uses a property management company. Our Grand Lodge does for its building as well.
My hunch is that not many do, but after our discussion with a professional, I think we must.
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Very well said. As Lucas points out, IF the lodge or other body is willing AND able to do the property management WORK, all well and good. That's a great way to give back to the craft. If the brothers are either not willing and/or not able to manage the building properly, it is a never-ending time and money sink, leading to frustration, conflict, and disillusionment.
My general opinion has always been that we should not manage our own buildings. The politics alone of it detracts from our Work. And I didn't become a Mason to worry about building repairs.
And we very often make bad decisions, time and again, for decades. My mother Lodge spent half a million dollars to repair a few overdue things, do cosmetics that didn't last, and put in an elevator that barely fits a walker and takes forever to go between floors. The building probably isn't worth in total what we put into it after years of construction and battles with contractors.