What is the company culture like at CYM Living?

- Learn how to work with minimal support/resources - Teaches you how to adapt under pressure

The culture here is honestly one of the most toxic work environments I’ve experienced. Personal relationships and favoritism seem to matter far more than actual performance, experience, or hard work. There appears to be a strong culture of personal connections influencing promotions and leadership hiring decisions, with friends and family frequently placed into high-paying leadership roles regardless of whether they have the experience typically expected for those positions. The company also appears to heavily favor friends’ and family members’ construction/supply companies, even when pricing is significantly higher than competing vendors, while simultaneously nickel-and-diming smaller or unrelated vendors over every expense to compensate. The hardest part is that leadership will constantly praise and reassure employees to their face, but the second you do something they dislike or become inconvenient, the narrative completely changes and suddenly you’re treated like you’ve been failing all along. It creates a very uncomfortable environment where employees never feel secure or genuinely valued. There are good people at the company, but the overall culture feels extremely political, inconsistent, and emotionally manipulative. Transparency and professionalism from upper management are lacking, and favoritism heavily impacts employee experience and advancement.

flexible hours fastpace a lot of leads

My experience working at CYM was honestly awful. They pay new leasing agents next to nothing hourly, which already makes it hard to stay motivated. On top of that, the training process was bizarre, we were expected to read off “scripts” like robots, which felt so unnatural when working with prospects. Some of their rules felt completely off, even to the point where I questioned whether they were violating fair housing laws. For example, we were not allowed to take family leads unless you were a “senior agent.” That was one of the strangest dynamics I’ve ever seen in property management and it created an incredibly toxic and unfair work environment. The company culture was full of micromanaging and favoritism. They constantly relied on college interns as cheap, free labor. If you’re looking for a professional, supportive company with clear policies and fair pay, this is NOT the place. The environment is disorganized, strange, and honestly exploitative.

- Learn how to work with minimal support/resources - Teaches you how to adapt under pressure

The culture here is honestly one of the most toxic work environments I’ve experienced. Personal relationships and favoritism seem to matter far more than actual performance, experience, or hard work. There appears to be a strong culture of personal connections influencing promotions and leadership hiring decisions, with friends and family frequently placed into high-paying leadership roles regardless of whether they have the experience typically expected for those positions. The company also appears to heavily favor friends’ and family members’ construction/supply companies, even when pricing is significantly higher than competing vendors, while simultaneously nickel-and-diming smaller or unrelated vendors over every expense to compensate. The hardest part is that leadership will constantly praise and reassure employees to their face, but the second you do something they dislike or become inconvenient, the narrative completely changes and suddenly you’re treated like you’ve been failing all along. It creates a very uncomfortable environment where employees never feel secure or genuinely valued. There are good people at the company, but the overall culture feels extremely political, inconsistent, and emotionally manipulative. Transparency and professionalism from upper management are lacking, and favoritism heavily impacts employee experience and advancement.

- Learn how to work with minimal support/resources - Teaches you how to adapt under pressure

The culture here is honestly one of the most toxic work environments I’ve experienced. Personal relationships and favoritism seem to matter far more than actual performance, experience, or hard work. There appears to be a strong culture of personal connections influencing promotions and leadership hiring decisions, with friends and family frequently placed into high-paying leadership roles regardless of whether they have the experience typically expected for those positions. The company also appears to heavily favor friends’ and family members’ construction/supply companies, even when pricing is significantly higher than competing vendors, while simultaneously nickel-and-diming smaller or unrelated vendors over every expense to compensate. The hardest part is that leadership will constantly praise and reassure employees to their face, but the second you do something they dislike or become inconvenient, the narrative completely changes and suddenly you’re treated like you’ve been failing all along. It creates a very uncomfortable environment where employees never feel secure or genuinely valued. There are good people at the company, but the overall culture feels extremely political, inconsistent, and emotionally manipulative. Transparency and professionalism from upper management are lacking, and favoritism heavily impacts employee experience and advancement.

On a property level, you become very close with your team.

Management does not give property manager’s any control of their properties. Company culture will make you feel worthless.

Sometimes there are bagels sometimes.

I spent over a decade with the original company before it was acquired by CYM. We were repeatedly told that “nothing would change” and that business would continue as usual. That turned out to be a blatant lie. Within a few months, the "co-founder"—a figure with no known credibility in the real estate world—decided it was appropriate to lay off half the team in the middle of the workday. Employees were paraded into an office one by one and handed pink slips like we were part of some dystopian HR experiment. Once the damage was done, he slipped away unnoticed and hopped a flight back to New York. No explanation. No leadership. Just silence and confusion. That gutless move was the company's first clear signal: there would be no real leadership here. Following that, the experienced executive team was pushed out and replaced by individuals woefully out of their depth. What followed felt less like a business operation and more like a group of amateurs pretending to be executives. Basic communication doesn’t exist. Professionalism, clearly, is optional. Worse yet, if you dare to present facts or challenge misinformation, the reaction is pure immaturity—complete with screaming fits over the phone. Imagine working for toddlers in suits, and you’ll get the picture. There’s no strategy, no vision, no accountability, and certainly no diversity—unless you count the wide range of bad decisions. CYM is a textbook example of what happens when ego replaces competence.