California's Capital Region: The Sacramento Valley

THE NATOMA COMPANY-
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT
SERVICES
Alice on Cheer Team.
The Natoma Company oversees apartment complexes in
the greater Sacramento area and surrounding foothills.
Currently, Natoma manages approximately 3,500 units of
individually owned and syndicated properties.
Natoma has built a sound reputation for aggressiveness in
the rental market by increasing property values, renting-up
new projects, controlling expenses and rehabilitating existing
properties. The company has a relationship of ten years or
more with about eighty-five percent of its current clientele.
Natoma provides full service property management for
multifamily communities, including all accounting, staffing,
bidding of major and minor projects and insurance and
overall supervision and renovations of the properties. The
firm also ensures compliance with all county, state and
federal regulations.
Natoma currently has three full-time property managers
on staff, all of whom are either a Certified Property Manager
or CPM ® candidate. Together, they represent a combined
total in excess of fifty years of experience and knowledge.
The Natoma Company utilizes an overall team management
approach in order to take advantage of each property manager’s
area of expertise.
The firm was founded in 1982 by Alice Elkins, Jim
Corbett, and Andy Efstratis. Prior to that, Alice worked for
Coldwell Banker and Jim and Andy were clients of hers.
They had a number of properties and approached Alice with
the idea of forming a partnership for their own property
management company. Alice eventually bought out Efstratis
and Corbett and became the sole owner.
The name Natoma comes from a Native American name
meaning running water upstream. It became the name of a
small native village along the American River, which stood
about where Lake Natoma is today, above the Nimbus Dam.
During her long career with Natoma, Alice has become a legendary
figure in the California property management industry.
A native of North Carolina, Alice was offered a full scholarship
to study Home Economics at Wake Forest University
following graduation from high school. She turned down the
scholarship, much to the dismay of her parents, because she
thought Home Ec teachers were all old maids and she did
not want to be like them. She wanted to enroll at Duke
University and study nursing, but that did not work out
either. She ended up attending the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill where she earned a degree as a dental
technician. When the Dean of Dentistry accepted a job at
UCLA, he persuaded Alice and three other students to go to
California and help set up the university’s dentistry program.
After deciding she would like to live in the San Francisco
area, her old boss gave her the name of some dentists in San
Francisco and she set out to look for a job. She had only
twelve dollars but refused to borrow money from her Dad
CALIFORNIA’S CAPITAL REGION - THE SACRAMENTO VALLEY
190