Dara Nicholson

Dara J. Nicholson, RPA, served as 1989 BOMA Atlanta President.

Dara Nicholson has a reputation as one of Atlanta’s leading property management executives. When Nicholson served as senior vice president of property management for Cousins Properties, her nationwide portfolio ranged from 15 to 21 million square feet of Class A office properties, providing service to more than 1,500 tenants, and responsible for expense budgets totaling more than $150 million. Nicholson developed, executed, and controlled a number of portfolio-wide, novel expense containment initiatives. She also created The Cousins Way, an admired 700-page electronic manual, covering topics from life safety, to fiscal controls, to human resource management, to emergency preparedness, and more. “Cuzway” dramatically shortened the learning curve and became an indispensable management tool for orientation, training, and best practices. Kingsley Associates, the nation’s leading real estate benchmarking firm, ranked Nicholson’s property management teams in the top two percentile for customer satisfaction, with scores that outperformed the tenant perception benchmark year after year. The firm’s tenant retention rate averaged more than 80 percent, one of the highest in the industry. While at Cousins, Nicholson’s properties received 74 TOBY (The Outstanding Building of the Year) Awards, nine LEED certifications, and numerous ENERGY STAR® awards.

Dara earned the Real Property Administrator (RPA) designation from the Building Owners and Managers Institute.