Condo Media - November 2013 - 48

VOLUNTEER SPOTLIGHT

Volunteer Proﬁle: Steve Dannin
From Novice to Guru, CAI-NE's Manager of the Year has Come a Long Way and is Still Enjoying the Journey

hat's a condominium association?" Steve Dannin,
CMCA, AMS, PCAM, has
come a long way since he
posed that question almost 25 years
ago to a friend offering to introduce
him to the owner of a condominium
management company.
Presented with CAI-New England's
Manager of the Year Award at the
chapter's annual dinner earlier this year,
Dannin was lauded at the awards ceremony for his commitment to his clients
and colleagues, his industry knowledge,
his enthusiasm for his work, and his
"tireless effort to [be] the most effective community manager he can be."
But 25 years ago, Dannin couldn't
deﬁne condominium, let alone envision
managing one. A student at Boston
University's School of Management,
he had been helping a friend renovate
the condominium unit he had bought
as a way to ﬁll time on Fridays, when
he had no classes. When that project
was complete, the friend introduced
Dannin to the association manager.
Focusing less on Dannin's lack of
condominium experience than on his
afﬁnity for working with his hands, the
manager hired him to work part-time
with the maintenance staff.
"As a kid," Dannin recalls, "I was
always in the garage building things."
One of his favorite television shows was
Bob Vila's This Old House. While he
was never "a full-time summer tool belt
guy," Dannin says, "I always wanted to
hang out with the construction guys,"
and he learned a lot by observing. "I
was the one who handed them the
tools they needed, and I loved knowing what they wanted before they asked
for it." By the time he approached the
48

CONDO MEDIA * NOVEMBER 2013

condominium manager, "I could pretty
much walk into a building and do
whatever needed to be done."
But when he reported for work on
his ﬁrst day, Dannin found, "there were
no maintenance guys around for me to
hook up with." No one had mentioned
that Dannin would be joining them.
It was the ﬁrst of the month, however,

Steven Dannin (l) accepts Manager of the Year Award
presented by 2012 CAI-NE chapter president Scott Wolf.

and when Dannin pointed out that he
knew how to run an adding machine,
the company controller put him to
work processing deposits. "I never
left the ofﬁce after that," Dannin says.
When he graduated a few months later,
his part-time position became full-time
and Dannin did move out of the business ofﬁce into the ﬁeld, working as an
association manager.

A Good Match

Dannin discovered quickly that this was a
good match for his interests and his skills.
An accounting major, he had planned to
go into that business with his father. But
though he was good with numbers, Dannin says he had never liked working with

them in a vacuum, unconnected to the
businesses generating them. "It bugged
me not knowing what the widgets [listed
on the spreadsheets] were."
Working as an association manager,
calculating how to match a community's income with its maintenance and
operations needs, produced "an aha
moment" for Dannin, when his business knowledge "collided with something physical that made sense to me."
He left the management company
after a couple of years to help a family friend run his insurance company.
But that turned out to be a short-term
arrangement. "It wasn't for me," Dannin says. So he accepted a position at a
large, downtown Boston condominium
management company. The owner of
a competing company, passing him
on the street one day, said, "Call me
when you want a job," to which Dannin replied, a bit brashly he admits, "I
already have one."
Undeterred, or at least intrigued,
that manager called a couple of weeks
later and asked what Dannin wanted.
He didn't hesitate: "I want to run my
own company."
"How about with partners?" the
competitor asked.
That's how Dannin, with less than
ﬁve years of condominium management experience, became one of three
principals in a ﬂedgling management
company. "They had to ﬁre a bookkeeper to pay me," he recalls.

Good Timing

But the company "was in the right
place at the right time," he says, offering the high-end services some associations were seeking, and the personal,
hands-on service that Dannin knew he

Condo Media - November 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Condo Media - November 2013