Colleen Costa, IREM Boston

October in the IREM world is very exciting because it is conference time and change time for members nationally and locally. Our National Conference this year will be held at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Educational sessions this year include keynote speaker Robert Stephens. Stephens invested $200 into an idea that many computer users need help at various times with their computers, and formed the Geek Squad. The Geek Squad was created in 1994 and picked up by Best Buy in 2004.

How would your company pass a Fair Housing Audit? This session will review how fair housing requirements affects property operations. Management practices will be assessed during this session as well as identifying areas of improvement going forward.

The Anatomy of Growth sessions will analyze how successful firms build on success.

A popular session will be Management Fees in Multifamily Housing. IREM funded a research project by Virginia Tech University to study those trends in fees as well as challenges in maintaining a balance for what it has billed to clients.

In addition, there will be a session to go over the recent June 25, 2015 Supreme Court decision on Disparate Impact. The case is Texas Dept. of Housing and Community Project verses Inclusive Communities Project. The Supreme Court voted the cases was valid under the Fair Housing Act. The session will answer what the actual case involved, how the ruling will affect your business. How can you protect yourself from potential ligation?

Our own Christopher Mellen, CPM, ARM, will be installed as the 2016 national president. Mellen is vice president of the Simon Companies, a national real estate owner, manager, and developer located in Braintree, Mass.

Other Boston members on national committees include the following:

• Jonathan Donahue, CPM, ARM, moves to the Income and Expense Committee. This committee is extremely important because it provides the comp data necessary for all property management companies to use while providing budgets for the coming year to clients in each of the line items.

• Neilie Sequeira, CPM, ARM, will maintain her seat on the Membership and Credentials Committee. This committee spends many hours evaluating our applications for membership as well as developing avenues to bring more members into the institute.

• Nancy Reno, CPM has become a national educational instructor. Reno will be teaching such classes as the ARM Track RES 201.

Yours truly will remain on the Ethics Committee and move to vice chair of the Ethics Inquiry Board.

Locally our new chapter president is Candace Morse, CPM, ARM. Morse comes from a long line of family members in IREM, and is a fourth generation IREM member. We wish Candace well in her year as president.

Colleen Costa, CPM, ARM, is the 2015 IREM Boston president and president and principal of CPC Management, LLC, Kingston, Mass.