Ivan, could you post up a mock-up of it so we could have a look at the whole thing? I've got some ideas, but I'd like to see it "in the flesh" so to speak.... ;-)

"Over 25 years of city codes experience"
Eh?

*Over 25 years experience

*City-code compliant

A fine can of worms here. Since you can use a telegraphic style in a resume, you could theoretically use either #2 or #3, with #3 being the most telegraphic. But then, what about an apostrophe for "years"? Some people say that the apostrophe isn't needed because the experience belongs to them and not the years, or that "years experience" is short for "years of experience" and not "years' worth of experience." Others say the apostrophe should be used because it's the genitive case (see the Chicago Manual of Style 15, paragraph 7.26).

(Later edit: just to be clear, I'm talking about whether it should be "25 years experience" or "25 years' experience.)

Since you don't know what the hiring manager's opinion will be, I think it's safer all around to use #1.

"City code" doesn't need to hyphenated unless your client was inspecting the codes themselves. However, there are different kinds of city codes (administrative, business, building, traffic). I assume from the combination of "property manager" and "city codes inspector" that your client was a building inspector. If so, consider using that instead of city code inspector ("With over 25 years of experience as a building inspector...").

If you can state which codes she was inspecting to (ICC, BOCA, SBCCI, ICBO, NFPA, ADA, ANSI, NEMA, UFAS), that would be good.

Wow Thanx A bunch everyone. Very helpful I'll have to think about this some more. Didn't realize how involved this can be. Let me think about it some more.

It's easy to get wrapped around the axle on this kind of stuff. Reasonable people often disagree, and it's not necessarily that there's a right way or a wrong way, just which way your audience expects to see it. Since that's hard to tell for a resume, I prefer to use the approach that's least likely to look like a typo or a grammatical error. In formal writing, I go with Chicago.

How about:
"enforcing city code compliance for over 25 years"

It's a little long, but more active and less ambiguous, no?

or what about this:
"enforcing city code compliance since 1979"

well... This would only work were he still a city inspector. As a property manager he'd need something different. Still, it's something to think about.

And given it's a business card, I'd be concerned about how much text is going to be on it. Sure, you can put a lot on, if you make it virtually unreadable, but that seems rather counter-productive, and why I would still like to see a mock-up. ;-)

Boy, did I had a senior moment: it's not a resume, it's a business card. So of course you can't list all the codes, and you want a pithy sentence. I think I'll just slink away now... but I still recommend using a construction that avoids the ^years^ vs. ^years'^ issue.