Grace Hill Expands Senior Leadership Team to Meet Accelerating Demand for Property Management Talent Performance Solutions

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Jul 16, 2020, 08:00 ET

GREENVILLE, S.C., July 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Grace Hill, a provider of policy, training and assessment tools to develop and retain property management talent, announced today the appointment of three executives to its senior leadership team.

Kendall Pretzer has been appointed Chief Operating Officer; Brad Becker will serve as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer; and Amy Acosta has been named Chief Financial Officer. The newly created COO, CTO and CPO roles reflect Grace Hill's growth and advances this year as the real estate industry has increasingly looked to bolster technology-enabled solutions.

"This year has proved transformational for Grace Hill and our platform for multifamily property management and elements of the real estate industry as a whole," said Grace Hill CEO Dru Armstrong. "Kendall, Brad and Amy are invested in our shared vision that will help us sustain the pace of change and excellence we are spearheading through our industry. The COVID-19 crisis has become an unfortunate driver of evolution in real estate and property management, including technology. And we are the technology that enables the talented people leading these changes to seamlessly adapt to new challenges while continuing to drive long-term growth."

COO Kendall Pretzer brings unprecedented business experience in the real estate industry including multifamily property management, as well as an unmatched reputation for driving operations excellence. She is the founder of The Strategic Solution, a pioneering policy management business that was acquired by Grace Hill in 2018. Most recently, she served as Executive Vice President and account management leader at Grace Hill.

"My career in business, primarily in multifamily real estate, has given me many opportunities to work with people interested in generating operating results and employee work satisfaction," said Pretzer. "In my opinion, those two factors are closely tied together; the better trained and enabled your associates are, the better the operating results. My background in property management companies in training and operations, as well as my experience working with customers, has shown me that data. The challenge is to find the right balance of training, enablement, and interaction with employees. The decision to sell my company, The Strategic Solution, to Grace Hill, under Dru Armstrong's leadership, offered a larger path to help companies create operational excellence and results through better employee satisfaction, engagement and enablement. I am excited to continue to push that forward in this new role."

CTO Brad Becker will also serve as Grace Hill's first Chief Product Officer, bringing forward his experience as the former Chief Design Officer for IBM Watson. He is also the founder of AI and VR company Sentient Play, which explores emerging technology for storytelling and games.

"Technology serves and enables talent," said Becker, "not the other way around. Real estate has a critical need right now for good technology to allow people to do better. Multifamily housing has unexpectedly become not only where we live our private lives, but now where we develop our careers at the same time. The Grace Hill team is working to empower the people who make the places where we live and work, feel safer, more secure and to open up more rewarding opportunities."

Amy Acosta brings to the role of CFO more than two decades of financial and operational leadership in the software, software-as-a-service and professional services industries. She is a member of the national CFO Leadership Council's steering committee and a well-known speaker on CFO excellence in technology-enabled businesses. She joins Grace Hill from Kasasa, a financial technology and marketing services company where she served as Chief Financial Officer.

"The disciplined execution of combining talent and technology is the key to seizing opportunity and growth today," said Acosta. "I am joining a team that is obsessed with delivering results that boost our clients' bottom line, setting them up for financial success while building meaningful connections with their employees and residents. As we continue to invest in market-leading solutions for our clients, we become an active participant in transforming our industry, and ultimately, the places where we all live."

The appointment of Pretzer, Becker and Acosta caps a six-month period that also saw the launch of Grace Hill's next generation learning platform, Vision 2020, and the acquisition of industry research and benchmarking tools provider, Kingsley Associates.

"I'm incredibly optimistic about the future of Grace Hill, as well as the future of a more technology-driven real estate industry," said Armstrong. "We have stepped into the challenges of the past months and come out stronger than ever, advancing new research and industry intelligence to guide better decision making. With this leadership team, and together with our customers, we are delivering a better future and we're ready to shape what's next."

About Grace Hill
Grace Hill helps companies managing multifamily residential properties reduce operating risk and increase property performance — with industry-leading policy, training and assessment solutions that develop, retain, and build top talent. Its advanced technology-enabled solutions are bolstered by years of multifamily experience, in-depth service-level expertise, outstanding customer support, as well as a partnership with the National Apartment Association Education Institute (NAAEI). Today, more than 1,600 companies covering a workforce of more than 500,000 people rely on talent performance solutions from Grace Hill.

Contact:
Chris Gale
203-570-4681
[email protected]

SOURCE Grace Hill