Property management can be a stressful, adversarial job for those who don’t approach it right. James Donnelly says his Plantation-based company, Castle Group, has cultivated a win-win approach. He calls it “Royal Service.”
It’s just one reason Donnelly has been named winner of the 2018 Sun Sentinel Excalibur Award as Large Business Leader in Broward County. Another reason: Donnelly persuaded Nova Southeastern University’s Huizenga Business School to create a property management program, helped fund it and was instrumental in creating the curriculum. He also established an online training program with more than 1,000 lessons that Castle Group employees can take to further their careers.
Property management is a large and ever-growing profession and the industry needs as many new professionals as it can mint, he says. In Florida, 333 new homes are built each day. Just about all of them are units of larger communities that require services of property managers. They’re the folks who collect monthly rent payments from renters. They collect homeowner association dues and send out reminder letters to members who don’t pay. They oversee parking lot repaving projects and tell owners of high-rise condos how they much money they owe for their shares. They answer phones and deal with unhappy owners or tenants.
As a result, property managers are not always the favorite people of tenants and homeowners.
But under Donnelly’s leadership, Castle Group’s staff members learn to defuse the potential of adversity. Donnelly says he modeled the Royal Service approach after customer services best practices he learned at the Ritz Carlton Leadership Center. “The best property manager is elegant in enforcing the rules,” Donnelly said. “There’s no need to be confrontational.” For example, he said, “instead of sending you a nasty letter that says you need to pressure-clean your roof, we would send out to the whole community, ‘This is the time of year that we recommend you do your roofs. Here are some excellent vendors. We will be doing our inspection on this date. Please take advantage of this time period to do it.’”
Imprints of Donnelly’s elegance are evident throughout Castle Group’s Plantation headquarters and history.
A recent ceiling-to-floor renovation of its building near Interstate 595 and West Broward Boulevard focused first and foremost on employee comfort. Workstations are suffused with generous dollops of white that blend with ample daylight to create a bright, awakened environment. A large cafeteria-style break room beckons employees to enjoy a guilt-free respite. Restaurant-style booths within the main work area provide comfortable space for impromptu, informal meetings.
It almost feels like a home away from home built for family gatherings — and that wouldn’t be far off base.
Some of Donnelly’s closest family and friends work close beside him, including his wife of 33 years, Cathy, whose desk is just a few feet from his office. She runs the charitable arm of the company, Castle Cares.
Younger brother Robert is the company’s chief operating officer, while its president, Craig Vaughan, has been Donnelly’s friend since kindergarten. They all moved here from Ottawa, Canada, in 1996 after spending six years buying Florida apartment buildings and converting them into condominiums for sale to fellow Canadians.
After the Canadian dollar plunged in value compared to the U.S. dollar in the mid-1990s, the condo conversion market was no longer viable, and some Canadian investors asked the group to move to South Florida and manage their properties for them. Twenty-five years later, Castle Group’s 1,500 employees in offices throughout the state oversee 330 properties comprising 125,000 units. Last year, the company reported $76 million in revenue. The properties are “higher end,” including apartment buildings, condos and gated homeowner association-controlled neighborhoods, Donnelly said. About 70 are high-rise towers, and several are multiuse developments that blend retail, office and housing spaces into the “work-live-play” environments favored by many of today’s young professionals, he said.
Donnelly says he understands their lifestyle. He and Cathy have three adult sons, and the oldest is 29. “And they don’t want to drive a car. They want to Uber or scooter or walk to all of those things, live, work and play.”
He and Cathy bought into that lifestyle as well, recently downsizing from a house in Weston, where they raised the boys, and trading it for a high-rise condo unit in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Being empty nesters gives the couple more time for philanthropic efforts. Their charitable endeavors began in 2004, when Cathy Donnelly created a food distribution program for the Broward County Boys and Girls Club that has been replicated by Boys and Girls Clubs nationwide.
Castle Cares was founded in 2010 to provide opportunities for employees and even residents of their managed communities. “We don’t ask them for their money, but we ask them for their time. It started with a day of caring, and we just finished, not too long ago, February is our month of caring. So we literally had something going every day of the month, somewhere in the state, giving back to the communities that we serve.”
“And then we just started taking leadership positions.” Cathy Donnelly is chairwoman of the Children’s Services Council of Broward County. James Donnelly just completed two years chairing the Broward Workshop and chairs the Community Foundation of Broward County’s $500 Million Be Bold Leadership Campaign, which is seeking to build a $500 million endowment by 2024 that would generate annual revenue for charitable use “forever.” Broward Workshop’s current chair, Keith Koenig, president of Tamarac-based City Furniture, said that while the growth of Castle Group is a “wonderful achievement,” he best knows James Donnelly for his work in the community where he has “made an enormous impact donating his time, his talent and his treasure.”
“His current role co-chairing the Broward Business Council on Homelessness (with AutoNation Executive Chairman Mike Jackson) has been very impactful in improving the lives of dozens of our less-fortunate neighbors,” Koenig said by email. Koenig served as vice chairman of Broward Workshop while James Donnelly was chairman. “He worked tirelessly to advance the initiatives we focus on including education, transportation and keeping Broward County’s environment positive for business and our quality of life,” he said. “As James’ vice chair, I saw how he skillfully added his humor into every topic and built consensus for us to build on.”
Other organizations James Donnelly is currently working with or recently served are Broward Business Council on Homelessness, Palm Beach Atlantic University LeMieux Center for Public Policy, United Way of Broward County and Broward Performing Arts Foundation. They give back because there are Broward County residents who need help, like people who were relocated from the homeless camp in downtown Fort Lauderdale downtown, he said.
“At first you think it’s an eyesore. And then you meet these people. One lady I met had two master’s degrees. But she had a traumatic brain injury and she is not able to help herself for the rest of her life. “This community has to help her for the rest of her life.”
By: Ron Hurtibise, South Florida Sun Sentinel
