CLASS Leasing: Apartmentguide.com

Here is a great slide show that was passed along by one of our great leasing specialists, Crystal Mitchem. This slide show details what the ILS, Apartmentguide.com, can offer to a property by having their listing through this website. Take the time to scan through the slide show to see what exactly the site has to offer for your property by listing with them. After all, according to the fourth slide of the show, Apartmentguide.com is the number one apartment ILS in 59 cities as of February 2011!

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Creating Community In Student Housing

Creating a "sense of community" at a student housing property is extremely vital to the overall success of that apartment community. More so than at any other conventional property, student properties rely heavily on word of mouth for new prospects. If students are having fun living at a community, then they will absolutely tell their friends about the great time they are having, which will in turn inevitably lead to the friends wanting to become residents. Creating a sense of community is not just something that is established by having a resident pool party once during the summer and being done with it. A sense of community entails: numerous events planned throughout the year; daily interactions between office staff and residents; knocking on residents doors to make sure they are enjoying their stay, and not just when it's time for lease renewal. Just think about what it is like to live in a neighborhood and those are the qualities that should be incorporated into the apartment living experience to create that sense of community.

Here is a webinar we sponsored this past Wednesday through Multifamily Insiders, in which Dan Oltersdorf of Campus Advantage outlines some key points to creating a successful sense of community in student housing.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: What Renters Want..

In the apartment industry it is every single person's duty, from the apartment developers all the way down to the maintenance workers, to figure out what the renters want. Apartment living is overall a very transient lifestyle and very rarely will you meet someone that has lived in the same apartment for a large number of years. People move for all sorts of reasons, whether it's just for a change a scenery, a job relocation, or in order to cut back on some costs, individuals that live in apartments will always move more than home dwellers.

Ultimately apartment employees do not want residents to move, because that leads to numerous amounts of vacants, which causes lack of income coming in. Therefore, the million dollar question to answer becomes what renters want. Apartments.com conducts a survey a few times a year to get inside the mind of the apartment renter to figure out what exactly it is that people are looking for. The results of the survey are always interesting to analyze, because they will change depending upon the time of the year. The most recent survey comes from February of 2011 and gives some great insight into what renters are looking for right now. Here are some highlights from the 1,800 individuals polled:

-28.8% were moving to relocate for employment opportunities
-20.3% of those that previously owned a home are moving, because renting is more
affordable
-26.3% are searching 1-2 months in advance of their desired move-in date
-48.3% said cost was the most important search criteria
-The top three resources people were using to search for their apartment are all
online resources

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Alternatives To Facebook?

Despite Facebook's overwhelming popularity in the world, there are many users that feel Facebook has become too large and is not as personalized as it was originally designed to be. It is in fact tough on Facebook to pick and choose amongst your friends as to who you would like to have view any information that you post on Facebook. Yes, there is the tedious option of going through ones privacy settings to select who you would like to have view certains items on your profile, but who has time to devote to that process? In addition Facebook has also at times become a network of acquaintances with many users "friends" not necessarily falling into that category. I myself can relate to this ideology, because I know for a fact that I can scan through my Facebook and find at least a handful of "friends" that I have neither met nor seen in my entire life.

Therefore these smaller social sites allow their users to be able to keep a tighter niche of friends, because many of them actually cap the number of friends one can have. In doing so users can feel more comfortable posting pictures and status updates without the fear of one of their friends other friends seeing their information through a community wall. One of these sites, Shizzlr, also has a unique social feature in that when a group is created, the server will actually compile a list of upcoming events from Yelp, Google and Facebook for this social circle group of close friends to discuss and decide which event they would like to attend.

I will be highlighting many of these sites this week, because each site has its own unique touch and social connectivity features.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Facebook Marketing Guide

Facebook published a "how to" for business marketing on their website last week and it is something that finally explains marketing on Facebook black and white. Prior to this guide being published, it was kind of a roll of the dice for many businesses looking to market through Facebook in many ways. The main thing that businesses did not realize is that the company needed to be represented by a Facebook Page that could be "liked" and not one that could be "friend requested." Those businesses that had pages created as a "friend request" page, instead of a "liked" page, were being cancelled by Facebook for the misrepresentation. In addition to laying the guidelines for setting up business Facebook pages, the marketing guide also goes into great detail about how a business should be marketed and some steps to take to gain more views in hopes of having a successful page.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Atlanta Market

Back when the housing market crashed, Atlanta, just like every other major city in the country, was still in the process of enjoying the insatiable "housing boom" with apartments and condominiums being thrown up everywhere. Once reality hit like a freight train, all of a sudden those same apartments and condominiums were left sitting vacant. Sellers were forced to rent and renters were forced to hopefully salvage enough credit to be welcome in these rental communities. Fast forward to 2010 and 67,000 of these rental commodities (facts per the Atlanta Journal Constitution) remained vacant as owners and developers watched their investments sit generating no revenue. Currently, Atlanta has developed into a rental heavy market, which favors those looking to rent greatly. Owners are still barely breaking even by dropping rental amounts and putting added resources to resident retention in hopes of not adding anymore vacants to the pot. As a current Atlanta resident, these facts come as no surprise, because on the one mile strip of major road I live on, there are 8 different apartment communities!

Enjoy and great find Macy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Google Reader

Here is another application courtesy of Google that will help to simplify and shorten your search experience for all of those sites that you cannot go the day without checking. Google Reader allows its users to create a database of specific sites via RSS Feeds and HTML addresses that will be updated and stored in one location. In doing so Google Reader serves as a one stop shop for a user in checking their favorite websites, as opposed to visiting each one individually searching for new content.

Using Google Reader is extremely advantageous is the user is an adamant follower of specific blogs, because not all blog writers have entries every day. Just as most applications through Google, Google Reader is free of charge and all that is needed is a Gmail account with any type of email address. In addition any entries that are stored daily from the websites a user is following can be easily shared with other users and notes can even be attached to the entry from user to user.

Just another application courtesy of Google that makes the search experience more enjoyable.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: The Top 50 Branded Facebook Pages

Ignite Social Media shared a great list recently of the top 50 branded Facebook pages as of March 28, 2011. This list is compiled based upon total number of fans, as well as the increase in fans on a monthly basis. It is pretty amazing to see that some of these pages added over one million fans in a thirty day span! Of course, just about every single business on this list is recognizable to everyone that has ever watched a television, but there still are a few surprises on there. Who would have thought that Converse All Stars would be in the top ten??

Take the time to open some of these pages to see the interaction that occurs on a daily basis in each one. Many of these pages are well known brands to begin with, but they still take the time to encourage fan interaction each day. Red Bull may have the best "hint" on what they would like for you to do if you open their fan page.

This list is not something that the typical business owner should look through and shoot to get their page on the list, because it is probably impossible. Many of these brands already have tens of millions of followers that joined their pages, because they already knew of these companies. That's not to say that there are not some great ideas to pull from this list, because obviously, all of these companies are doing many things right.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Can You Hear Me Now?

I came across a great article in Multifamily Executive that really shows how reliant individuals are becoming on one certain aspect of technology...the all mighty cell phone. Due to the dwindling number of people that actually have a landline phone in their apartments, apartment owners and developers are actually having to implement new cell phone towers, or enhancers to existing towers, in order to keep residents, especially college-aged residents, pleased with living at these communities. In fact, cell phone signal ranks second in importance in a recent survey of 52,000 college students only behind the desire for larger bedroom size! Interested in seeing what the word on the web was about cell phone signal problems in apartments, I came to the realization how rampant of a problem this actually is by simply typing "apartment cell phone signal" into Google. Every single search result, minus a few, were postings by consumers asking how to improve their cell phone signal at their apartment. As the endless realm of what one is able to do with a cell phone continues to expand, the demand for cell phone signal strength as almost an amenity will only continue to increase.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Guerrilla Marketing

I always enjoy seeing great examples of "guerrilla marketing," because it always blows my mind to see the creativity that people continue to dream up for this marketing originator. After all, when the glitz and glamor of all of the internet marketing do not work, you always have to resort back to pounding the pavement and taking the in your face approach to marketing.

Here is another fun example of guerrilla marketing courtesy of The Guerrilla Blog.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: The Potential Benefits Of Having A Blog

It's no secret that social media is only as beneficial as you make it in the sense that if no one is seeing your material, it's not going to be beneficial. It's pretty simple and as easy as that. The more material that one gets into the World Wide Web, then the chances are only increased that someone will stumble upon an excerpt of that persons writings.

One of the more personal and potentially effective venues of social media is the blog. Blogging allows an individual or company, such as this very blog, the opportunity to put together thoughts and topics related to the area or field one is involved with. I blog about apartment and marketing related topics, because we are a company that is known for specializing in apartments and marketing in the industry. Where blogging becomes most effective is when the entries begin to develop a following via Facebook, Twitter, etc. As more Facebook shares and retweets occur, the horizon of those reached by the blog exponentially expands. With all of the blogs that there are in the World Wide Web, creating a following is not the easiest of tasks to accomplish. The material must be consistently worthwhile and meaningful, or the followers will begin to dwindle as blogs become more monotonous.

Mark Schaefer's blog is one of the better blogs I have read and if you will notice, he has a strong group of followers each day. In addition, Mark's blog is designed as more of a homepage for his website, because the blog has basically developed into its own entity with a mass and consistent following. This highlights another crucial benefit to a well written blog, in that it can actually be used as ones website as opposed to spending the exorbitant amount of marketing dollars necessary for website design. Mark's blog sets the bar high, but is a great example of a blog to follow and hopefully emulate for one's own.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: PadMapper

I spent this morning browsing through the apartment Craigslist ads of all of the cities that we are currently working in and began to wonder something. If I in fact were a prospect looking for an apartment in one of these numerous cities and I own an Iphone, surely there is an app that makes the search not only easier, but more interactive for its users.

With this thought in mind, I opened a new browser to Google and typed in "iphone apartment search" to see just what exists out there in the application world. There were actually numerous results that came up, but the one that really caught my attention was the application called PadMapper.

PadMapper's sole purpose is to aim to make the apartment search "less painful by letting you see where the apartments are on a big Google map, and using the filters located in the box on the lower left to eliminate listings that you're not interested in" (per PadMapper's website About section). Based upon their definition on their site, PadMapper was basically verbatim of what I was out to find. The most relevant piece of information about their site that especially intrigued me is the fact that Craigslist is one of the main websites that PadMapper pulls from!

Seeing the application in action is a must, because the map is user friendly and interactive, allowing the user to be able to see with a pin-point where exactly the apartment is located.

Great app!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: The Best Resident Event Contest!

This is a chance for everyone to share your best resident event idea with other members of the apartment industry and also potentially win some money for it as well.

Multifamily Insiders is running this contest in collaboration with Resident Events and Peachtree, looking for the best resident event ideas out there right now. All you have to do is click on the Multifamily Insiders link, fill out your great resident event idea prior to May 31st and set back and wait to see if your event is selected.

This is a fun opportunity, so I strongly encourage everyone to get involved, because you never know, you may stumble across someone else's post and use their great idea for the next resident event at your property!

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing

CLASS Leasing: Facebook Send Button

Well it appears that Facebook is at it yet again with a new development to their site that was just released last week, which I learned about via Social Media Examiner. Facebook added a "Send" Button function to their site that is more or less an advanced "Like" Button that engages the users on a much more personal level. This is the general description that Facebook released in regards to the new Send Button:

"The Send Button allows your users to easily send your content to their friends. People will have the option to send your URL in an inbox message to their Facebook friends, to the group wall of any Facebook group they are a member of, and as an email to any email address. While the Like Button allows users to share your content with all of their friends, the Send Button allows them to send a private message to just a few friends."

The Send Button is another way for individuals on Facebook to share content with their friends, which from a business standpoint, is another opportunity to have traffic driven to participating web pages. The Send Button greatly reduces the steps that one would typically have to make in order to share relative information with individuals via online. The Send Button will surely be equally as popular, if not more so, than the Like Button, which has already infiltrated millions of web pages after only one year in existence.

Enjoy!

CLASS Leasing