Our social media customers often need to build their fan bases from scratch, so we came up with a list of tips to help them. Here are 5 tips you can implement with no out-of-pocket costs.

1. Put Facebook and Twitter links to your property pages on your website. On property specific websites, put the link in the header of every page. On sites with multiple properties, put the link on property-specific pages. Surprisingly, we've met a lot of resistance from client website vendors and in some cases, link requests have been flat out denied. Don’t take no for an answer.

2. Put Facebook and Twitter links in your email signature. If you can put html in your email signature, you can add links to your social media services. My email signature has icons that link to my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages as well as my blog. However, you may also want to consider using text links instead of image links, as some users suppress images in their emails. It's up to you. There is no “right” answer. Need help? Just contact me and I'll send you a sample code.

When leasing apartments, there are plenty of challenges with maintaining a high conversion rate that are completely out of the leasing consultants hands.  For example, there might be a lack of availability, the prospect might not need an apartment immediately, the prospect's credit is poor, or the available apartments may just be too expensive for the apartment hunter.  These situations can be horribly frustrating to a leasing consultant, as it impacts his or her supposed effectiveness.  This can hurt morale and even lead to lying to maintain a fake bloated conversion rate.

 

Even more important, many communities do not have any strategy to handle these types of rejections.  I've seen countless times where the leasing consultant simply told the prospect that they did not have any two bedrooms in their time frame and let the prospect walk out the door. 

Stouffer's marketing department needs to invest in a thesaurus. 

Tonight, while watching one of the 30 episodes of Law and Order on my DVR, I was away from my remote when the commercial break came to pass.  It's been a while since I've actually watched a commercial.  In fact, since the invention of the DVR, the only time I've watched commercials is when the remote has somehow fallen between the cushions of the couch and I cannot find it, resulting in a frenzied search for the thing before I have to hear Luke Wilson try to spin AT&T as having good coverage.  (He's full of horse plops.)

In my search for the holy remote tonight, I had to hear about how Stouffer's makes families stronger by gathering them around the dinner table to eat meals full of, "Wholesome Goodness."  This statement elicited a derisive snort of disbelief from me, as I have several times eaten Stouffer's meals and I'll tell you right now that the ONLY thing they are full of is salt and preservatives, and possibly the same thing that Luke Wilson is full of.

The problem is words.  The English language is awesome at using a lot of words and sounding like there's a meaning in them, when in fact, there is nothing being said by them at all.  This is pretty prevalent in the world of food marketing.

• Organic
• Wholesome
• Lite
• Diet
• Healthy
• All Natural

The problem is, people are wising up.  It once was that you could slap two or three of those puppies on a box of terrible food, and not only would people buy it, but you could charge 30% more for it.  Anymore though, when I see the word "Healthy" on a box, I read the label.  It's NEVER healthy.  It might not be as bad for you as something else, but it's still not healthy.

What about us?  The words we use in our ads?  Granted, perhaps I've spent more time than most reading through countless ads on Craigslist and other ILS sites, but I can't tell you how many ads look just like the ad before them, and the ad before that one, and the ad before that one.  It's all the same.    Everyone uses the same words, and because of that, you're not distinguishing your product.  What's worse, I have visited some of the properties that I'm reading ads for, and your property is NOT what you're writing about.

If you're running out of words, don't use the same ones that everyone else is using.  Think of a different way to get your message out there, and actually use some words that MEAN SOMETHING!  After all, if your ad is the first contact that you have a potential new resident, why would you want to start out that relationship in the pretense of a lie, or what they might perceive to be a lie?

If you're not a wordsmith, and it's okay if you aren't, check out these resources:

Power Sales Words - Oliver
Words that Sell - Bayan

Both are excellent sources for descriptions of what you may have, and remember, should all else fail, Microsoft Word has a built in Thesaurus!

 

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 It's an odd bunch of metros on the list of the nation's recent apartment demand leaders.

In one camp are areas like Austin and San Antonio. Those locales added lots of new supply that progressed through initial lease-up at a rapid pace during the past year. And, at the same time, move-outs from their existing stocks were held to minimal levels since recent job cuts proved comparatively mild. Austin absorbed almost 7,800 apartments during calendar 2009, and the demand tally in San Antonio reached a little over 4,400 units.

In the perhaps more surprising story, top absorption centers for the past year also include several markets that added only a few new apartments that would help stimulate leasing activity and that suffered dramatic job losses that would have drained renters from their existing apartment inventories during a normal economic cycle. What pushed up apartment demand in those areas was a resurgence of home and/or condo sales, reducing the volume of shadow market alternatives offered for rent, after those other options had captured an unusually large share of total rental demand over the previous year or two. In a pair of the most striking examples of this pattern, the Inland Empire posted demand for just over 3,700 apartments during calendar 2009, and Orlando absorbed nearly 3,500 apartment units.

Do call centers equal great customer service, or do on-site teams need to handle these calls to continue the relationship they have with their residents?  This is the debate that started on Twitter from some great Tweets by Mark Juleen (@theaptnerd).  Here's the background story...

 

 

Last Saturday's New York Times article titled "Real Estate Looks Risky, but Less So for Bargain Hunters," which takes a look at the current climate of commercial real estate investing, posed an interesting question in my mind.

"‘The trick with investing in commercial real estate is not knowing if something is bad, but knowing if that ‘bad' is priced in,' said David Frame, global head of alternative investments at J.P. Morgan Private Bank."

After many conversations revolving around multifamily management I have heard a recurring theme around the "costs" associated with marketing. The value of renewing more of the leases that expire and the possible gains of more strategic marketing investments appears to be a very important focus in the current economic environment.

Last night, while at a great presentation at the UCF School of Real Estate in Orlando, a not so pretty picture of the market was shown. The theme of the presentation was; Repositioning Real Estate, Political & Economic Trends, it was very interesting and gave a good sense of the challenges as well as opportunities. What I heard is that, while these are challenging times, it is making for better business practices, sharper companies and will result in greater performance for those that keep looking ahead.

The thought of repositioning is as much strategic as it is emotional. It is strategic in the sense that we have to do the math to warrant new investments or reallocations, and emotional in the sense that because when writing a check it really needs to be viewed as an investment. Cutting to cut can often prove to be actually detrimental in the long haul. In the course of conversations I often hear that budgets have to be managed aggressively and I believe this always should be true. Many have accumulated some legacy expenses that do warrant a hard look. So here are my questions to you:

• When it comes to marketing, is cost really important if a ROI can be achieved that ultimately improves your business NOI?
• By taking a hard look at marketing from an investment angle, where do you think is the best place to invest for your business?

February’s units Magazine did a nice article on the topic of deleted Facebook Pages and I wanted to expand on the discussion here.

This is link to the original units Article: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/naa/201002/#/36 (I love this new electronic version).

 The article discusses the fact that businesses, including apartment communities, should create Facebook Pages rather than Profiles to keep in line with Facebook's Terms of Service and protect against Facebook deleting the profile.  We also know of apartment communities that lost their Facebook (Fan) Pages because the Facebook Page was associated with an employee’s personal profile and when the employee left the company, they deleted the page.

A pretty simple question, but one I ask myself all the time.

As seen @ Tidbits from The Apartment Nerd

 You Know you have a Team When

1.        At staff strategy meetings they do most of the talking

2.       When you walk in the room there is no sudden "hush"