Chief Operating Officer (COO)-Property Management & Real Estate Services. (Washington DC-Baltimore Area)

Chief Operating Officer

About this role

A well-established, family-owned property management and real estate company in the DC metro is hiring its first true Chief Operating Officer who will run the company — service delivery, financial performance, the team, and the growth engine.

This is not a caretaker seat. You will own the operation.

What you'll own

• Run the business. Translate the owner's vision into executable plans, priorities, and measurable outcomes. Own the operating rhythm — weekly leadership meetings, 1:1s, quarterly Rocks, scorecards. Serve as the second seat and the gatekeeper to the Visionary.
• Own the operation. Service delivery across property management, owner services, tenant services, and maintenance coordination. Vendor networks, response times, cost to serve, and the systems that keep quality consistent as volume grows.
• Own the numbers. Partner on budgeting, financial planning, and P&L. Track lead conversion, revenue per door, cost to acquire, churn, profitability, and labor efficiency — and act on what they tell you.
• Lead the team. Manage direct reports across the business. Hire, coach, and develop managers so accountability doesn't live with you alone. Set the standard and hold it.
• Build the referral engine. This business grows through professional relationships — real estate agents, lenders, title and settlement partners, investors, relocation channels. Today those relationships are personal and informal. You'll turn them into a system: named partner targets, a defined outreach and nurture process, activity standards, KPIs, and someone accountable to them. There is no sales incentive plan today — you'll build it with the owner. The plan that pays your team is one you help write.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years leading operations with cross-functional responsibility at a growing company — you've run an operation, not a department, with ownership of financial results, service delivery, and the people who deliver it
• Experience building an affiliate or referral pipeline — a repeatable process for generating revenue through professional partners, not cold outbound
• A track record of building systems people actually followed — process where there wasn't any, adopted and measured, not documented and shelved
• Strong lead-manage-accountability skills: you hold people to standards without drama
• You've hired, coached, and exited people, and taken a performance problem to a clean end
• Fluency with budgets, P&L, and the unit economics of a service business

Preferred

• Property management or real estate background
• CRM and process management experience (LeadSimple, AppFolio, Propertyware, Buildium, Rent Manager, or similar)

Open to operators from outside property management

If you've run operations in a business where revenue arrives through professional referral partners — home warranty, title and settlement, mortgage, corporate or military relocation, insurance, 1031 exchange and investor services, or brokerage operations — the operating shape will be familiar: high transaction volume, a vendor network you don't employ, several stakeholders per file, real compliance exposure, and margins decided by cost to serve.

Who fits here

You're grounded and people-focused. You bring structure without bureaucracy, you say the hard thing clearly and respectfully, and you read the room. You're energized by taking a well-run, established business and building the systems that let it scale.