Prospect and Residents. Keep Them Separated

Maintenance requests are an everyday part of our business. But it doesn’t need to be the business of our prospects. When a resident comes into the office to place a work order, where are they directed? Hopefully it is not to the same area where prospects are filling out a guest card or an application.

Think about standing in line to order at Wendy’s and a person walks up to complain that there is hair in their food. Not very appetizing is it…

The same thing can happen when we are trying to close on a prospect and a resident comes in to request pest control for their apartment.

Why not keep them separated? It is not hard to have an area of the office where we direct our current resident to discuss work orders and rent questions.

Let’s keep the prospect surrounded by the positives... not the negatives.

Concessions,... what is the point?

I shopped a property the other day and when I asked how much the rent was for a 1 bedroom apartment I was told it was on special for $695. I asked the girl what the rent was regularly and she didn't know. Really.....

Concessions have become so common in our industry that our own Leasing Agents don't even know the market value of the product. If the 1 bedroom in question had a market rent of $800, then we can now consider it completely devalued. What is the use of having a special if our sales people don't even know the value of the special?

Isn't that the point of the special, to show the prospect what he or she will be saving? To show the prospect that they can live in an $800/ month apartment for $695....

As far as I know the apartment in question has a $695 value. I am sure the owner would be thrilled to know that in the eyes of the prospect their asset just depreciated by $1,260 per unit annually.

If that’s how we are going to sell a concession then what is the point?

Kicking Things off!

So lets call this Post#1 and get this thing kicked off right. Welcome to TheSolutionToVacancies blog, where multi-family news, ideas, and attempted humor will be the name of the game.

On tap here at TheSolutionToVacancies we will be serving up some marketing ideas, stories of tours gone wrong, industry news, and of course the occasional tribute to The Georgia Bulldogs. you can also follow along on twitter. Twitter name DannySoule.

So to start things up I'll leave you with the totally creepy Mick Jagger. I guess when you sell more then 200 million records it's ok to be this weird.......http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed36UQX8kXQ

Happy Monday!!!!!!