When I first met DD Garzon (Lee), I could tell right away she was the kind of leader who doesn’t wait for permission. Her energy fills a room.Thoughtful, determined, and grounded in action. As the newly installed President of NARPM (National Association of Residential Property Managers), she’s stepping into one of the most important leadership moments this industry has seen in years.

Our conversation stretched from her early days cold-calling at AT&T, to founding her own management company, to shaping what she calls NARPM 2.0. It is a movement to professionalize and reframe single-family property management for good.

“The biggest problem we’re solving right now,” DD said, “is the perception that landlords and tenants are on opposite sides. We’re actually in the middle and we can bring both together.”

Yes! (I slam my desk & smile).

It’s easy to forget how much of our industry lives in that middle ground, balancing empathy and economics, people and policy. She’s right: property managers are translators between two worlds that rarely trust each other, and the current narrative isn’t helping.

DD sees that gap as an opportunity. By educating both sides, residents and landlords. She believes property managers can lead the way to fairness and better housing outcomes.

And she’s not wrong. I’ve seen firsthand how the loudest voices in the media tend to be the most negative. As DD put it, “Bad news sells; good property management doesn’t make headlines.”

“If you don’t tell your story,” she told me, “someone else will tell it for you and you probably won’t like how they tell it.”

That’s when our conversation shifted to what she calls owning the message. NARPM’s next era isn’t just about regulation or ethics, it’s about reclaiming the narrative.

She wants to make professionalism visible again. To show that there’s a difference between an untrained landlord trying to figure it out on Craigslist, and a licensed, ethical NARPM member managing a property responsibly.

That resonated with me. I was once one of those untrained, intentional (but accidental) landlords. 

As someone who’s spent years trying to improve resident experiences through technology, I’ve learned that storytelling matters just as much as systems. You can have the best tools in the world, but if people don’t trust the hands using them, you’ve already lost the room.

“When I joined NARPM, I realized I’d been doing everything wrong,” DD laughed. “It saved my business and maybe my license.”

I loved that honesty.

Before leading a national organization, she built her company from scratch. She started in tech studying computer science at Georgia Tech then discovered property management almost by accident.

When her broker told her “no” to starting a PM division, she got licensed and built it herself. Within a few years, she was managing 500 doors.

Her real superpower though wasn’t scale, it was systems. She saw early that property management needed automation, education, and standards if it was ever going to grow sustainably.

It reminded me of my own lesson in business that I learned from Allan Klassen: you can’t scale chaos, you can only scale clarity.

“Technology shouldn’t replace people,” she said. “It should give them their time back.”

That’s a principle I live by.

DD explained how every software decision she made came down to one simple question: Does it make life easier for residents, owners, and the team? If the answer was yes, she invested.

That mindset shaped the way I think about efficiency too. I used to chase automation just for the speed. But now, like DD, I realize the goal isn’t to move faster, it’s to move freer.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems – James Clear (Atomic Habits)

When your systems serve your people, your people can serve better. 

“If we don’t do this, someone else will and they won’t do it for us,” she warned.

That’s how she framed NARPM’s mission for the next two years: to professionalize the industry before it’s [sic: over] regulated by others.

She talked about collecting better data, creating public awareness campaigns, and setting measurable standards of ethics and education.

It’s ambitious, she’s right. If we want lawmakers and the media to see the truth about property management, we have to show them the data, not respond to the sensationalism.

Listening to her, I could feel how personal this was. For DD, leadership isn’t about titles or platforms. It’s about making the industry better for the next generation for the single mom renting her first home, for the young investor trying to build wealth, for the property manager who’s tired of feeling like the bad guy.

From my side of the mic, here’s what I learned and what I’m still thinking about after talking with DD Lee:

• Tell your story before someone else does. Leadership starts with narrative clarity.
  
• Education beats opinion. The more we know, the less we fear each other.
  
• Technology is empathy in disguise. When it saves time, it saves relationships.
  
• Professionalism isn’t a badge. It’s a promise.
  
• And the future of housing depends on collaboration, not conflict.
  

As DD takes the reins at NARPM, she’s not just building a better association. She’s building trust back into the story of property management.

And honestly, that’s the kind of leadership our industry needs right now.