Two decades operating multifamily assets — now applied to counsel's toughest questions.
My expert practice is grounded in the day-to-day work of running apartment communities: inspection routes, vendor contracts, staffing decisions, capital projects, and the escalation calls that happen at 2 a.m.
I lead operations at a family-owned real estate firm in the Upper Ohio Valley and have spent my career in and around multifamily property management, development, and brokerage. Cumulatively, my career experience covers more than twelve thousand units and roughly twenty-five to thirty acquisition due-diligence reviews, spanning garden-style, mid-rise, senior, affordable, market-rate, and mixed-use assets.
I hold the Certified Property Manager (CPM®) and Accredited Residential Manager (ARM®) designations from the Institute of Real Estate Management, and I completed the National Apartment Association's CAPS coursework and examination — a designation I let lapse by election while maintaining my CPM continuing education. My work as an expert witness draws on that credential curriculum as an industry framework for inspection, documentation, preventive maintenance, risk management, staffing, and supervisory oversight.
IREM®, CPM®, CERTIFIED PROPERTY MANAGER®, ARM®, and ACCREDITED RESIDENTIAL MANAGER® are registered marks of the Institute of Real Estate Management. Their use identifies credentials held by Emily Goodman Shortall and does not imply IREM endorsement of this practice.
Before founding Harvey Goodman Property Management, I served as Regional Vice President at CORE Realty Holdings, running a multi-state portfolio of more than six thousand units with full P&L accountability, and as Associate General Manager of a 1.5-million-square-foot super-regional center for General Growth Properties. I have served IREM at the national level — as Region 13 President on the National Executive Committee and as chair of the National ARM Committee — and I have taught Real Estate Principles & Practices as an adjunct professor at Belmont College since 2015. That combination is what I bring to a file: I have written the policies, supervised the people who execute them, and taught the standards to the next generation of managers.
How I work with counsel
Every engagement starts with a conflict check and a scope conversation. From there, I read the property management agreement, deposition transcripts, interrogatory answers, inspection and vendor records, and the photographs and incident materials. I develop an operator's benchmark for the type of property and jurisdiction at issue, then compare that benchmark to the record.
My reports are organized around operational standards, record application, findings, functional responsibility, and explicit non-opinions. I avoid opinions on legal duty, breach, negligence, causation, and liability — those remain for counsel and the factfinder. Where regulations or safety standards inform the operator benchmark, I present them as operational context and defer to counsel on their legal interpretation.
What I do not opine on
I am not a security-tactics, criminology, ballistics, or security-system engineering expert. On matters involving apartment security, my lane is the multifamily property-management standards side — access control policy, camera and inspection governance, vendor oversight, incident escalation, and how a reasonably prudent operator supervises those systems. I recommend specialty experts where the case calls for them.