Please share your most creative and successful resident event!

I'm looking for some examples of the most creative and successful resident events that have been held at your communities. Thanks!

The most positive response I had from a retention even was the car wash. Who doesn't want to see their landlord wash their car? LOL. Since our property doesn't allow car washing on the premises, it was a HUGE hit! The best part is the cost was under 20 bucks!

I have seen community yard sales, where the property placed the ads and made rental tables available upon request (they found that they could rent tables at a cost of $XX each, but needed a 1 week lead time to reserve them). What they did is send a notice to all residents to inform them that they wound be hosting and promoting a community yard sale; and that tables were going to be available, but they would need to be paid for 15 days before the planned date. This was a 2 day event, and arrangements were made for a local charity to pick up the remaining items on the following Monday. I have ALSO seen properties use their clubhouses as polling places on election day. Often the local registrar of voters PAYS a small stipend for the use of the space; and you can make it known to your residents that you are doing this in the event any of them may want to be poll workers.

Both of these have the added benefit of generating traffic into the property for tours.

The most creative one we ever did was a Casino Night. We hired a casino company that had dealers and tables. We did it around the pool, had strobe lights, a red carpet, food catered from local restaurants, photos with someone dressed as "Elvis," etc. It was a huge hit and talked about for a LONG time by the residents. For the month prior, we also invited all of our prospects, sent direct mailers to neighboring properties, marketed it to local businesses....we definitely got some leases out of it in addition to giving our residents a good time.

I have been doing this for a lot of years and I have had some successful events under my belt but my biggest secret that I have to offer to anyone looking for a successful event is this... You can't make everyone happy.. so don't. My most successful events have been events that have been geared towards a certain age group. Everyone is invited but you focus on that age group and it makes it successful each time. A kids day in the pool w/ little mermaid and Nemo decorations with free icecream... focus is on kids but you'll be amazed how many parents (and non-parents) have a good time. Have a chili cook off (seniors love this!) and gear the advertising towards seniors as the taste testers and gear advertising to the contestants in a certain age group. Have a pool party focusing your advertsing on 20 somethings and you'll have a great turn out for every age! Most communities have an array of different people and different ages... you won't be 100% successful if you try to find something everyone likes.. because not everyone like everything.... Just my little helpful hint.

I would celebrate your community's diversity and host a potluck lunch/dinner where your RESIDENTS can make and bring their favorite dish from their family/culture. You provide the paper/plastic plates, utensils, drinks, and side dishes. You can take this further if you have it on a weekend and invite your recent traffic to come in and meet the residents.

Something else I have seen is the property asked the residents to provide a copy of the recipe to one of the staff members, who would compile it into a cookbook and have them available for sale ($5-$10 each) and donate the proceeds to a local shelter on behalf of the residents. This would need to be done in such a way that the cookbooks can be printed in time for the potluck so you have a quantity on hand and can take orders when you run out (say printing 100 initiially, and taking orders for those expressing interest after those 100 are gone).

The most positive, successful and extremely cost effective resident event I had was “Meet Your Neighbors Day” The event was held after hours, and we recruited assistance from the local vendors and food providers. Each vendor donated food, gifts, games or drinks for the meeting. The event was magnificent, we had approximately over 100 people attend, and we had games, prizes and bunch of food and drinks to offer. It really was a great way for the residents to meet each other and our onsite staff. It created a huge rapport with everyone, and really helped our renewals and resident referrals. The best of it all, it didn’t cost the site anything, because it was all collected from the vendors and local business each month.

Thanks for all of your responses. I love how they are expanded upon to make them more creative and personal. For instance, taking the idea to have a potluck dinner and turning into something thats focus is on the culture and diversity of the community. This tells residents that you not only care about them, but helps to create that sense of community...and that's what sells these days.

I would love to hear more ideas along this line... Come on, I KNOW you all have more in your retention arsenal!!

I don't know if this qualifies as an event, but given the rapid decline of the quality of customer service; maybe it SHOULD be......


I don't know about you, but I CELEBRATE when I get the service I EXPECT, as opposed to what I am willing to ACCEPT (often these are two different things)...

Give your residents excellent customer service and anticipate their needs. Train your staff to realize that the single biggest line item on the budgets of your residents is likely to be their rent; and treat that relationship as such....

We held an event for national night out...we invited our residents to get to know one another we had a dunk tank, bounce house, and ordered pizza the residents loved the dunk tank who wouldnt want a chance to dunk their manager...