Nicole Martone – Towne & Country Management

The room was tense before Nicole Martone said a word. Homeowners packed the folding chairs of a New Jersey community clubhouse, budget printouts in hand, many of them already certain that a 58 percent jump in monthly fees was a mistake somebody was about to have to defend. That somebody, on this particular evening, was Martone, partner and COO of Towne & Country Management, who had chosen to be there in person rather than let the board face the room alone.

Nicole Martone | Towne & Country Management | Partner & Chief Operating Officer

That instinct, to show up rather than send a memo, has come to define Martone’s leadership at Towne & Country, a boutique property management company founded in 2007 and based in New Jersey. The firm manages just over 50 buildings and nearly 12,000 units for condominium and homeowners’ associations across the region, and it has built its reputation on a high-touch service model that gives board members and community leaders direct access to the people actually managing their properties, rather than routing them through call centers and layers of automation the way larger competitors often do.

A different kind of scale

Towne & Country’s pitch has always been intimacy: know the buildings, know the boards, know the people. In an industry where the biggest players compete largely on price and geographic reach, that intimacy has become the company’s clearest point of differentiation, the reason a board that has been ignored by a national management firm often ends up calling a smaller outfit instead. That model has taken on renewed energy since Martone stepped into her current role in November 2025, a period during which the company has entered an active growth phase, adding five new clients and more than 1,500 units in the most recent quarter alone.

Growth at that pace can strain a boutique operator’s core promise. Add enough buildings quickly enough, and even a company built on personal relationships can start to feel like the impersonal competitors it was founded to avoid.

“We can add buildings, but the moment a homeowner feels like a number, we’ve lost what makes us different,” Martone says.

Martone has made it her mission to prove that a family-style culture does not have to erode as the client roster expands, treating every new contract as a test of whether the company can grow its footprint without growing distant from the people it serves. Her approach draws on prior experience in a VP-level operating role, where she learned to identify the gaps that keep a growing company from delivering the same level of service at scale, and to close them before clients notice they exist.

The reserve funding reckoning

Nowhere has that philosophy been tested more directly than in the wake of new New Jersey legislation requiring stronger reserve funding for condominium and homeowners’ associations, a response to the Champlain Towers collapse in Florida that pushed reserve requirements to the top of the legislative agenda nationwide. The law is forcing communities across the state to significantly increase monthly fees in order to properly fund long-term maintenance, and for many boards, delivering that news has meant fielding anger they did not create and cannot easily explain away.

Martone decided early on that boards should not have to carry that burden alone. She has personally attended community meetings to walk homeowners through complex financial data, insurance requirements and reserve studies in language that does not require an accounting degree to follow.

“I would rather stand in a room and explain the math myself than have a board absorb that anger alone,” says Martone.

By positioning herself as both educator and advocate in cases like the 58 percent fee increase, she has tried to lower the temperature in rooms that could easily become adversarial.

That project has become something of a proving ground for the company’s boutique value proposition. Large management firms rarely send an executive to stand in front of an angry room and answer questions in real time. Towne & Country does, putting into practice a principle Martone calls education over prescription.

“It’s not enough to hand someone a fee increase and tell them it’s legally required,” says Martone. “If we can help people understand the why behind reserve funding, we get a lot further than if we just told them what to do.”

Martone has bet that the extra hours spent in community rooms pay for themselves many times over in retained trust, especially at a moment when reserve funding reform is unsettling communities across the entire state.

Growing without losing the family feel

The same instinct is now shaping where Towne & Country goes next. The company is exploring expansion beyond New Jersey into the Chesapeake corridor, including Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C., and as far north as Boston. That growth is likely to come through both organic client acquisition and the purchase of smaller regional management companies, giving Towne & Country two levers to build a footprint quickly in unfamiliar markets. Martone has taken an active role in that strategy, including participation in the CAI Pennsylvania chapter, and she has been personally involved in evaluating both potential personnel placements and acquisition targets as the company decides how aggressively to pursue new territory.

Interstate growth would mark a real turning point for a company that has largely built its identity as a regional New Jersey player. Successfully translating a hands-on, relationship-driven model into new states, without diluting the personal touch that clients have come to expect, would validate the scalability of the boutique approach Martone has spent her tenure refining.

“If we can make this model work outside New Jersey, it proves the whole thing was never really about geography,” says Martone.

Martone has approached the question deliberately rather than opportunistically, favoring markets where Towne & Country already has some professional footing through industry associations over simply chasing the fastest available deal.

Proving culture can scale

Expansion is not the only front where Towne & Country is investing in its future. The company is planning a software platform enhancement for 2026, alongside the introduction of reserve investment services designed to help associations grow their reserve funds through structured investment offerings brought in through new business partnerships. Together, the initiatives are meant to modernize the company’s back-office infrastructure and deepen what it can offer clients beyond day-to-day management, making Towne & Country stickier with existing relationships and more competitive when pitching new ones.

Martone is overseeing both efforts as part of a broader mandate she has set for herself.

“My job is to bring the operational discipline of a big company into a business that still wants to feel like a small one,” Martone says.

It is a balancing act with no obvious finish line, but she seems determined to keep working at it, meeting by meeting, community by community, as Towne & Country tries to prove that growth and a family culture were never actually at odds in the first place.