Many communities maintain 9 to 5 hours exactly coinciding with the working hours of our apartment residents. Why is this? Shouldn’t we take a hint from retail sales. Business hours need to allow residents to take care of business at their convenience and not ours. Why not maintain hours from 10:00a.m. to 6:30p.m. Let’s adjust to the needs of our customers.
Archive for September, 2009
Apartment Residents Deserve Convenience
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Online Applications Win 4 to 1 Over Phone Call Leads
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009We have recently compiled statistics from our own apartment customers that show that a properties receives almost 4 times as many completed online apartment applications as phone calls if the consumer has an option. This seems a pretty significant fact when an application is much more likely to result in a lease. This fact follows others we’ve seen from our own experience. The online consumer is heavily focused on convenience. If you deliver convenience the probability of a sale rises sharply.
Advertising Your Multifamily Communities Differentiated Strengths
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009Is your sign a differentiator for your apartment property? Are you showing photos and discussing the items that set you apart?
I know this is an area we’ve often failed to do as well as we should. If you would like more good insights to this visit Lisa Trosien’s Apartment Marketing Blog. She offers some great specific insights we can all take advantage of on this subject area.
For communities we serve, convenience is a differentiator. Our online application and other services make it easier for resident prospects to sign up and the results are dramatic. In one market, having a phone number only produces 20% of the total results that having a phone number and an online application will produce.
What Information Do You Provide To Resident Prospects?
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009I’ve written about this before, but feel this is a drum that can’t be beaten to often. As apartment operators providing a full set of information to resident prospects is a leasing prerequisite. The main bullets on the subject are:
Detailed community information such including directions to your property, local shopping, services, entertainment, government facilities, schools, utilities, cable television, major employers, and points of interest. The more the prospect can be positioned to decide this is the home for them the better.
Detailed apartment community information including amenities in the unit, pools, laundry, fitness facilities, playgrounds, picnic areas, walking trails, tennis courts, etc.
Information about the staff and attitude toward residents. The extent they can begin to develop a sense of relationship can make a major difference in their decision to make your apartment homes their home.
Information about pricing, operating hours, and to cost benefits your apartment community may have over competitors can provide the competitive edge your need to lease an apartment unit.
Finally, make it convenient and nonthreatening to make a buy decision. Provide alternatives for connection. The contact should allow the prospect to contact the community or if they are inclined, allow them to complete a full billable application. Completed correctly, we’ve seen communities close 10% or more of their leases based on this approach.
Online Rental Application and Rental Application Managment Software
Monday, September 14th, 2009In the past few weeks, we have made several great improvements to our Online Rental Application and our Application Management Software. Please take a moment to watch our 4 minute video:
Download the video below.
Key Multifamily Property Due Diligence Items
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009Multifamily property due diligence is a critical task that involves much more than simply checking the condition of the property and comparing local rents. If completed correctly, the process will provide the information needed to make a prudent purchase decision, to mitigate post purchase risk, and increase post purchase cash flow and profits.
Useful due diligence should provide information about the market, submarket, the property, the current tenants, and local demographics (considering future tenant make up potential).
Market
For the broad market, due diligence should provide:
- Breakdown of employment including the major employers,
- Broad demographic averages of:
- Race,
- Sex,
- Age, and
- Income,
- Market growth over two decennials
- Infrastructure factors
- Entertainment
- Identify property management companies active in the market, their fees, and their actual operations delivery.
Submarket
- Major local employers;
- Crime;
- Schools (demographics, scores, news, condition of facilities);
- Surrounding neighborhoods (reviewed and various times of day and weekday and weekend);
- Entertainment;
- Shopping;
- Restaurants;
- Competing properties:
- Visit the competitors and collect their hours, rates, collateral, visit units, and identify amenities.
- Coorelate property age, rents and revenues
- Find out occupancies
- Observe the closes competitors at various times of day on a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (principally to identify demographics and to verify occupancy claims and to correct occupancy assumption if observations illustrate different conditions); and
- Infrastructure
Property
- Punchlist by unit, building, common area facilities, streets and parking, lighting, landscaping, and a walkover of the grounds for drainage, fence conditions, retaining wall conditions, etc.
- Plumbing review:
- Type of plumbing
- Waterheater conditions
- Metering
- Grounds leaks
- Other leakage and water damage issues
- Electrical review
- Per unit amps
- Metering
- Aluminum or copper
- Gas Review (if applicable) – Metering
- Office review
- Photos of all the above and photos that show:
- Highlights of units,
- Grounds highlights,
- Property highlights,
- Property “opportunities” (unused land or opportunity layouts)
- Current office highlight,
- Signage,
- Property issues and repair requirements with clear association to notes
Tenants
- Review the rent roll and identify delinquent rent by unit.
- Review rent roll versus received revenue
- Past tenant issues
- Inspection of property conditions and tenant activity for all units on a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday including review of mid morning, mid afternoon, early evening, and late evening (9pm or later). Issues should be tied as closely to specific units as possible.
- A sex offenders search on the property and surrounding addresses
- Auto conditions in the parking lots
- Observations about ethnicity, age, race, and employment from inspections, the rent roll, and discussion with the property manager
Local Demographics (Property Zipcode)
- Age,
- Sex,
- Income, and
- Race
These items should be reduced to a report that identifies information in a format that:
- Identifies issues and mitigation suggestions for physical factors,
- Identifies revenue expectations as is and opportunities,
- Provides the information to provide a rent up plan based on the buyer’s intended operation and/or improvement of the property
With these items in hand, the new purchaser is positioned to operationally and financially minimize risk and to maximize their expected return.
Good luck and good buying.
Resident Retention Activities / Ideas by Brent Williams at Apartment Insiders
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009Brent Williams at Multifamily Insiders Crafted a Great Article on Resident Retention at Ezine Articles.
Activity Ideas for Resident Retention
“First of all, know your community. Fair Housing laws limit how much demographic information we can keep about our residents, but you should at least have an idea of the different faces of your community. Additionally, instead of having one giant one-size-fits-all party, you can coordinate several smaller, targeted parties throughout the year. Having more frequent parties allows you to target different demographic groups in your community at different times instead of “putting all your eggs in one basket” approach of large summer events. Spacing these events throughout the year will also guarantee that your events coincide with all your residents’ renewal periods, thus giving you the largest impact possible. Here a few ideas that can you can explore that are less expensive:
Older Residents
- Bridge or Mah Jongg Night
- Dinner Rotation – This can be quite popular! Have a sign up period for singles or couples. These groups then take turns rotating among their apartments hosting small dinner parties for each other.
Singles Crowd
- Poker Night at the Clubhouse (for prizes instead of money)
- Networking Night
- Dance Classes
- Sporting events
Children Friendly
- Ice Cream Social
- Kite Day
- Scavenger Hunt
Also, remember that you have purchasing power! Most events around town offer group rates that you can pass along to your residents. This can make them feel part of an exclusive club with great deals all the time!”
The full article is titled – Resident Retention Vs Apartment Marketing
For more info from Brent and about Multifamily Insiders the site is at: http://www.multifamilyinsiders.com/home/index.php
A Good Article on Link Building
Monday, September 7th, 2009Hooked on the Idea of Link Bait?
Natural search engine optimization (define) can often require an investment of time and money that many online businesses aren’t prepared to make. In its most elemental form, SEO consists of three components: technical optimization to ensure content can be crawled by the engines, content optimization to help get indexed for targeted words and phrases that convert, and link building, which generally speaks for itself. What most folks fail to understand is all three elements are bound to each other.
You’ll only get a so-so performance from link-building efforts if you invest in creating phenomenal content that is hidden behind an uncrawlable online destination within an unindexable content management system (CMS). To make your content seen, it must be visible to both search engine spiders and humans, as well as located at an unappended, static URL, to be considered optimal.
Similarly, link building is predominantly about creating link bait, but link bait only works with great content that can be promoted through old and new marketing venues alike. You have to invest in content creation. You also need to promote the heck out of it.
Before you jump straight into link building, understand just how ready your site is for serving up some link bait. To do that, we need to agree what link bait is.
Eric Ward, also known as Link Moses, describes link bait best: “What many people call linkbait or Link Bait, I call content.” Essentially, link bait can be just about any content you create anywhere on the Web that inspires other people to link to it. Inbound links can be aggregated to a page within a site, a blog, a forum, an archived e-mail newsletter, a photo journal, a product review, an all-Flash for fun page, or something similar.
The ultimate result of link bait is to bring higher traffic to your site and, consequently, improve your search engine positioning for targeted keywords or keyword phrases. The real question is: are you really ready for creating some link bait?
Let’s look at some obvious possibilities for creating link bait. Baiting the hook with link-worthy content usually centers around six different constructs. On the upside, there are news items, helpful resources, humor, and entertainment. On the downside, there are controversial opinions, confrontational attacks, and fear mongering.
News items can be leveraged to produce link bait by just about anyone for nearly anything. News items and newsworthy events work well for garnering global, regional, and especially local links. So you first have to ask if your site can be a reliable source for serving up current news and events.
You can grow a solid readership that turns to you when they want to know what’s happening in the neighborhood, community, city, state, country, or world. But first, an area of your site has to be able to serve up the content in a technically optimal manner.
You can’t just set up a news and information section within your site and expect your first link-bait expedition to be a winner. That’s why incorporating blog software like WordPress or Moveable Type into your site might be a necessary prerequisite if your CMS can’t handle building out an optimal article archival process. As I said earlier, link building can require an investment of time and money before you ever start to figure out what type of content will be created for link bait.
Remember, creating link bait isn’t always about having an article make it to Digg’s home page. If every time you post notable news items on your site you gain 1, 2, 5, or 10 prominent links, then the articles did their job. Don’t underestimate small increases in legitimate link-building initiatives. In many cases earning just a few high-quality links can help you attain your link-building goals more efficiently than trying to hit an article out of the link-bait park every time you send an article up to bat.
If the news or event-based link bait works on pages within your site, don’t hesitate to bring the content to the forefront of the site, even if it’s a storefront, especially if the links you’re earning help build anchor text links for highly coveted keywords and phrases.
Providing news or event notices to a virtual community is a great way for you and your business to become an active member in actual communities. Annual events, in particular, can be the focus of link bait year after year. It’s just a matter of recognizing the opportunity to meld one occasion with another to channel your hard-earned links to an optimal online destination. That’s the great thing about link bait: when you figure out what works, you can readily recycle the process again and again.
Next time, we’ll look at a few link-bait campaigns that worked and discuss some of the trappings of producing controversial content. Until then, think about how news and events or how-to content could be a part of your overall link-building strategy to determine if you are really ready to create some link bait.
Online Apartment Leasing Leads – How to Find Them and How to Win Them
Monday, September 7th, 2009Introduction
Most multifamily resident prospects today come from the Internet. While we know this, what is the flow from interest to Internet search that leads a renting lead to contact your apartment complex and eventually rent?
In General
First, we can’t ignore how the prospect ends up in front of their computer searching for a new apartment home. This can and often does pay a large role in how the resident prospect finds your apartment community or ends up at your competitor. And, once they become a lead, we should consider how we assure that if they are a qualified tenant that we believe is attractive to our community that they sign our apartment lease. Or alternately, if our multifamily competitor wins the first look, how do we take advantage of the mistakes most will ultimately make, how do we position to become their replacement and the ultimate winner of this prospects signed lease?
Before the Internet Search Begins
Prior to the resident prospect beginning their apartment search, what is happening to this consumer that we hope will eventually rent our apartment? They are receiving many inputs that effect the choice that will ultimately affect their decision including:
- Distance from work
- Convenience to services and shopping
- Access to friends
- Minimum features, amenities, floor plan
- Recommendations from friends
- Community quality and area quality
The Well Prepared Apartment Community – Before the Internet Search Begins
The well prepared multifamily community is addressing the issues prior to the tenant prospect taking the first apartment search key stroke. How does an apartment community prepare?
The key issues include:
- Know who your prospects are. Identify the kinds of jobs they will have their probable age. Determine broadly sets of interests they will have.
- Based on interests, where do they work? Where do they play? Where do they eat? How do they relax? What do they drive?
- Based on where they spend their time, how do you put your apartment community in front of them in those environments? Should you be a sponsor on a local softball league? Are you active in the religious community and should you be? Have you established referral programs with the right employers?
- Have you set up partnerships with garages, dealerships, etc.
- Do you have partnerships with entertainment and dining to make your community more attractive through a coupon plan or discount plan that is mutually beneficial?
- Do you have right signage disbursed around the community? Can you establish more signage?
If these are in place, your community is significantly better positioned to be recognized in advance and potential to win the lease afterwards.
On the Internet
Once the prospective renter takes the first key strokes, what happens? You can be certain that there is little likelihood that they type in your website address. Many people aren’t even firmly aware of URLs as they have become entirely dependent on search engines and bookmarks to find an refind sites that are of interest. This means that if you aren’t well positioned on the Internet your access to potential renters will be sharply limited.
However, if you can position your community to appear first on search you have 2.5X the opportunity to gain the prospect’s attention than if you are second on the list and 3X than if you are third on the list. After that, one can argue you gain little even being on the page. Gaining this kind of position requires a combination of web posting, pay per click, and Internet Listing Service (ILS) provider support. In all likelihood, the three together are too expensive and you will have to make choices. But hey! That is ok because if you are before enough searching renters, your property will have plenty of prospects.
Most apartment communities know that Internet presence is enough, but few understand how damaging having to share space with other communities can be. Unfortunately, this is a trend that shows no sign of falling… All an apartment property can do is choose the best compromise of solutions.
What You Can Count On
Apartment Finder, Apartments.com, Rent.com, My New Space are paying for presence and have traffic and content enough to rank well. Choosing these services (with some attention to which does the best in your area) is effective. This may be enough to satisfy the needs of your apartment complex.
What You Can Do
If the third party sources are not enough, then you have to invest in creating a strong web page. By invest, I don’t mean pay thousands of dollars. I mean choose a low cost site builder, and develop the content to attract prospects. Then over time, you can develop a competitive edge that will put you at the top of the search list for a solid number of searches that the ILS will be unable to deliver on. How do you do this?
1) Set up a page using Wordpress, Typepad, or similar services. The cost is only a few dollars per month (less than $20).
2) Include lots of content:
- Floor plans,
- Amenities,
- Rates,
- Neighborhood descriptions,
- Directions,
- Shopping destinations,
- Entertainment,
- Government services,
- Lists of annual activities,
- Schools and school contacts,
3) The content needs to be tailored to use the search term you would expect consumers to use to find your apartment complex.
4) Finally, if the property wants to really get the most from the site, they should add weekly “blog” updates to apartment activities, events, etc. This is likely beyond what most property managers or property management staffs will or can undertake.
With these items in place, your community stands a good chance of performing better than most of the local competition attracting resident prospect calls, visits, emails, applications, and finally leases.
A Great Article on How Linking Can Impact Your Website’s Performance
Sunday, September 6th, 2009The Apartment Industry has few real successes in the website world as far as properties or portfolios go… This article may offer solutions to overcome that. Seems like this would be a good Chamber of Commerce Issue.
Why Linking Is so Important for Ranking
By Mike Grehan, ClickZ,
Jul 27, 2009
The science of information retrieval on the Web is continually developing. Because of new discoveries and alternative methods of identifying popular results, search marketing has to continually develop with it. Yet, just last week I talked with someone who’s still trying to come to terms with why links are so important for a Web site to secure a prominent spot on a SERP (define). Sometimes I’m guilty of assuming that, by now, everyone understands why links are the building blocks of a successful SEO (define) campaign. But the search marketing industry is still emerging and new people are coming in every day. So, here’s a refresher on how linkage data became such an important factor. By about 1996, the early search engines began to discover that ranking documents based purely on content similarity (between the query and the document) was no longer sufficient for two reasons. For one, the amount of content created between the mid- to late ’90s was so huge, the abundance of information made it too hard to identify the top 20 pages to rank. Second, it was easy to spam search engines by keyword stuffing and creating doorway pages to manipulate ranking. During 1997 and 1998, a whole lot of research work was carried out in the field of applying social network analysis to the Web. The two most important ranking algorithms to emerge were Google’s widely known PageRank and the lesser known HITS developed by Professor Jon Kleinberg. Social network analysis is the study of social entities (people in an organization known as “actors”) and their interactions and relationships. And these interactions and relationships (networks) can be represented in a graphical format. Search engines take this similar approach, viewing the Web as a virtual social network. In this way, each page can be regarded as a social actor and each link between pages can be viewed as a relationship. Two important concepts of social network analysis are factored into hyperlink-based ranking algorithms: centrality and prestige. Centrality basically means that a person with extensive contacts (links) in a community is usually considered more important than a person with relatively few. And prestige is pretty much based on the number of important people linked to you. This is why we talk about quality of links being more important than simply quantity. As I explained these fundamentals to my friend last week, a light bulb genuinely seemed to go ping. At least he now understood the reasons for moving away from purely text-based analysis to a refined measure of prominence for one page over another, even when they have similar content. Of course, that leads immediately to the SEO chestnut: “How do I get links?” And yes, I’m smiling as I type it. It’s a question I’ve been asked at every conference or via e-mail hundreds of times. In particular, smaller businesses and owners of smaller Web sites seem to puzzle over this more than others. I’m afraid, just like the real world offline, the rules online aren’t much different. Small businesses are, well, small. Large businesses are large. The bigger the brand, the more likely it will get links. Stop and think about this: How did the big boys get so big? They didn’t all start big. Most big companies started small and grew. In a similar manner, this is what small companies online need to do. You need to set goals for growth (a large dose of patience is also required). I once asked a guy from a search engine how a small business online can attract links. He gave me this great analogy based around network theory. He said to imagine moving to a new town where nobody knows you. What’s the first thing you do? You start to introduce yourself and meet new people. And then pretty soon you’re part of the community and you’re building up your reputation. Who’s to say that one day you won’t be mayor? My best advice for getting links has always been: “Stop thinking about links.” Start thinking about promoting your business with a smart marketing strategy and links become a byproduct of that. Develop a niche and a reputation for yourself as providing the best customer service or the fastest delivery times — whatever it is you do to differentiate from your competitors. That is where the linking advantage is. One exercise I always go through with clients (big and small) is to ask them to write down 10 reasons why I should link to them. Sit down in front of your own Web site, alone or with your team, and ask what compelling reasons there are for other people to link to it. I haven’t actually seen anybody get beyond five or six. But it’s a good way to assess the strength of your value proposition, whatever it is. If you can’t get beyond why your friends and family should link to your site, you may want to ask what the purpose of building it was in the first place!
