Low-rent landlord boasts a full house.

• Position: Marshall-Blackwell Group - Tar Heel Tattler

Marshall-blackwell Group would have to manage prisons to achieve a higher occupancy rate.

About 95 percent of the Raleigh-based apartment manager's 8,000-plus units are full, and there's a five-year waiting list on most units.

There's a catch, of course. Marshall-Blackwell's bread and butter is lowbrow, high-risk, government-subsidized housing.

"We concentrate on a segment of the market that was not so horribly overbuilt during the mid-'80s," says Rick Marshall, who helped form the company in 1980 after working with a number of companies that contract services to the government.

The complexes the company manages are not owned by the government. Individuals - attracted by incentives such as insured mortgages, tax breaks and rent paid in large part by Uncle Sam bought them as investments but don't want to hassle with renting or keeping them up.

Also on the downside are reams of paper work and annual government audits. "There is a high administrative workload that comes with government-subsidized housing," says Gordon Blackwell, who has owned and...