Behind the Leasing Desk

This is the Multifamily 5x5 for the week of March 15th, 2010, Behind the Leasing Desk's weekly web show where you get 5 topics in 5 minutes. 

Between floor mats, sticky gas pedals, and some questionable braking systems, Toyota has not exactly had the best first quarter ever.  Working in an industry where I hear people complain about the online ratings being brutal, I'm sure that those of you who've felt the sting of Apartment Ratings can sympathize, at least on some level.  Cars, apartments, Walmart - Bad PR is always the same. (Except for Walmart... they deserve to wiggle on the hook a bit.)  Turning around a problem is all about how you react to it.

  Did Toyota drop the ball on this one?  Okay, yeah they did.  Run away gas pedal = uber scary and media hype-ability. 

It WAS bad.

But they fessed up. 

See, this is the part where you get to start turning the bad stuff around.  Denial is easy, but not productive and not helpful to your reputation.  A real step 1 is ALWAYS the same: Fess Up.  Toyota had to recall over 400,000 Prius Hybrids and the total vehicle recalls tallied around 8.5 million.  Expensive, but to save their brand, it was necessary.  They might have acted a bit slow for the needs of the immediate gratification American society, 55% of whom, according to a recent Gallup poll, aren't happy with the response time.

Step 2: Resist the urge to tell people how they're totally blowing this out of proportion.  Look, I ran the numbers here.  We are talking about 19 unarguably tragic deaths in a span of 10 years, counted across 20 MILLION cars. That puts your actual odds of being killed by this defect at infinitesimal when compared to going down in a plane crash - 1 in 6,137 flights a year - being hit by lightning - 1 in 56,439 a year - or dying in an earthquake - 1 in 120,161.  But did they throw that out there?  Nope.

Instead, they moved to step 3: Focus on what we CAN do and the good we have done.  Granted, their ads aren't talking about the types of cars right now, gas mileage, etc., but what they are focused on is rebuilding consumer confidence.  They're talking about safety.  Sure, that's usually Volvo's shtick, but hey, it works.  At least they realize that the fundamental TRUST is what they have to rebuild.  People might forget over time, but trust takes effort to heal.  And it's working.  According to that same Gallup poll, 60% of Americans think it's safe to be in a Toyota.  53% of Americans who don't own a Toyota think they are safe, and among owners, that figure rises to 80%.

Are these steps going to sweep everything under the rug and make it go away? Certainly not, but they are going to go a long way in restoring and retaining customer relationships.  There's not a step that Toyota made that we in the apartment industry cannot also take in responding to criticism.  Take a moment to ponder this before you access that manager account on Apartment Ratings.  You might just change your response.

The Multifamily 5x5 is Behind the Leasing Desk's weekly web show, posted every Monday morning on our consulting site at www.btldconsulting.com.   We give you five topics in five minutes to kick off your week!

 

 

Heather is the Imagination In Charge of Behind the Leasing Desk Consulting Services out of the always beautiful, but sometimes rainy, Seattle area!  If you liked this blog, check out some of her other entries at her home blog - www.behindtheleasingdesk.com or check out her other ideas, dear heather letters, and Multifamily 5x5 broadcasts every Monday at www.btldconsulting.com

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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The Multifamily 5x5 is Behind the Leasing Desk's weekly web show, posted every Monday morning on our consulting site at www.btldconsulting.com.   We give you five topics in five minutes to kick off your week!

 

 

 Once upon a time, I was a theatre major.  This was during the era in my life that my parents referred to as, "Heather making decisions that will not earn her a lucrative career."  As I took more art and theatre classes, and their hair grew grayer and, in the case of my dad, more sparse, I actually learned a ton of skills that have become invaluable to me in my day to day life.  As a theatre major, one of the elective courses I took was "Improvisational Acting."

This class was amazing, and I saw funnier stuff come out of my classmates than I saw the rest of the time we were at college.  For the first month of the class, the teacher, Kate, let people pretty much go where the moment took them.  Inevitably, it always lead to liberal use of the F-word,sex or drugs or sex AND drugs while saying the F-word.

Was it funny?  Sometimes.  We were in our early 20's, after all.

After the first month, Kate made the rule that we couldn't go there anymore.  Her justification was that it was, "too easy," for a laugh, and it wasn't really taking a lot of thought.  We could go anywhere else, but we couldn't go to sex and drugs, and we started to limit the casual mega swears.

It got a heck of a lot funnier after that.

See, when you make the joke or get the laugh with bad language, sex, and drugs, what you're getting is the reactionary laugh.  Your joke is cotton candy.  It might taste good in the moment, but a few seconds later, it's gone and no one really remembers why it was so funny.  Real comedy, long lasting laughter that sticks with you, comes from a much deeper connection with your audience.  It comes from reaching them in a place that's way beyond the surface reaction.  This humor is the emotional meal of meat and potatoes that keeps you full for a long time.

Such as it is with marketing.  So many people in our industry are jumping into the blogging world, and many of them are really urgently pushing for higher traffic and massive word of mouth buzz.  I think blogging is great, obviously, but I'm going to caution you all to follow my old professor's advice.  Skip the sex, the drugs, and the being provocative for the sake of being provocative. 

It might be funny to talk about the sex lives of your residents or about receiving the complaints, but your community blog is NOT the place to do it.  Any public forum isn't really someplace I'd suggest it.  In general terms, maybe, but never in embarrassing personal terms.  And talking about that, "herbal smell," that you've got coming out of apartment 3B on the blog, that's also something I'd put the kibosh on right quick. 

Will this stuff get people to talk about you?  Sure.  Everyone likes to talk about things that someone should have never said.  But is this the kind of talk that you really want people to be saying?  Word of mouth can be a great weapon, but the other side of that sword is that it's a painful adversary as well.  Don't let the bad word of mouth come from something you should have never published online.

It's not enough that people talk about you; they have to be saying something that will increase your business for it to be truly effective marketing. If you want people to talk about you in a way that benefits your property,  then you have to do something, write something, be something, that is just that: Remarkable.  Otherwise, you're just gossip.

 

Heather is a consultant, speaker, and trainer in the Seattle area with BTLD Consulting.  Check out more of her property management ideas at www.behindtheleasingdesk.com !

[Written for the Multifamily Insiders' Apartment Jobs section]

 

Over the last few months, I've worked with several clients, and advised several friends, as they were going through the hiring process to add new staff members to their companies. 

"I want someone with experience," they'll say to me.  "Gag," I'll say in return.

Well, no, I don't say it.  But I think it really loudly.

 Mental Exhaustion. 

That's what I get when I try to call my local doctor these days.  Now, I love my doctor because she doesn't think I'm weird and doesn't make sweeping statements like, "You're going to die if you get Pneumonia,"  but getting just a tiny bit of information out of the clinic is a process that sucks.  First I call, and I tell them what's wrong and ask if I need an appointment for that.  They tell me that they don't know, but that they will have an RN call me back and let me know.  The RN calls back, under an UNKNOWN number (Who doesn't check the # on their caller ID these days?  I hate telemarketers, so I don't answer that nonsense!), leaves me a message with no information except her name, which she rushes through so that I can't actually hear what it was, and tells me to call her back.  I call the number she leaves, no more than 5 minutes after missing the call, and end up at a call center where they don't know me from Adam, they don't know who I'm looking for, and they don't know what my original call was about, and the hold, transfer, hold transfer, hold process takes about 25 minutes of my life that I'll never get back.  What I'm sure they did know was how annoyed I was with the whole insane process of trying to get to talk to someone who can tell me whether or not I should bother a doctor!

I don't hate the people at the call center.  The dude I hate is the one who came up with this asinine plan and thought it worked as functioning customer service.  As a customer, I don't expect that I'm your only person to talk to.  I don't expect that you have nothing better to do than dote on me and my issue.  However, I expect that you respect my time at least as much as you respect your own, and you don't lead me on a wild goose chase through phone-ville hell!

How often does it take more than one phone call for your residents to reach the person they need to?   If you find yourself playing phone tag with your residents, remember that their irritation with the service grows exponentially each and every time they have to call you back for the same issue, and it grows faster than that if you don't know what they're talking about.  Just like being transfered from department to department, residents also don't fancy having to deal with multiple people on the same issue, so if you catch the problem, own it and fix it, and make sure you stay with it, even if you have to involve the manger, until the problem is resolved.

Do you have a resident issue follow up calender?  This can be so easy to integrate into Outlook.  Choose a color of importance and when you know there is a resident with an issue, set yourself up with a reminder (and including a description of the issue HELPS here...) that will pop up and remind you to make that call today.  There are few things that annoy people more than when they feel their opinion or time are not valued by those around them.  At home, we should always feel valued, don't you think?

And remember, according to an article from 2007 that I found on the Courier Mail, people spend, no, make that WASTE 60 million HOURS each and every year on hold.   60 Million!  Don't tell a customer you'll be right back, unless you're really going to be right back.  Otherwise, respect their time enough to get their number and call them back when you say you will, because they really don't need to hear the Muzak and sales pitch for the community while you find their file.

Heather is a consultant, speaker, and trainer in the Seattle area with BTLD Consulting.  Check out more of her property management ideas at www.behindtheleasingdesk.com !

At last November's  Multifamily Pro Brainstorming conference in Houston, one of the trends that Tami found focusworthy for the upcoming year was "Localism," -  being able to find what's important in the community around you. The trend is prevalent, as we even see it showing up in the current month's issue of UNITS, where on the in and out list marketing your location has gone IN and marketing your amenities has gone OUT.   What are the special gem factors about where you live?  

• Local Businesses-  What can renters find in your neighborhood/town that they can't find other places?  I currently rent in a suburb of Seattle called Issaquah.  In this charming little hamlet you can find a Caffe Ladro (a regional chain that is usually only found in DT Seattle), the Issaquah Brewhouse (home of Rogue Ale and many meat dishes stuffed with Blu Cheese), Flying Pie Pizza (where the toppings pile high and the grease is plentiful), Alice's Beauty Shop (the first stylist in 15 years to not cut Alan's hair so that the final result was HORRID!) and you are less than 20 min from the beautiful Sahalish Lodge.  And that's just the stuff I've Yelped recently.
• Local Festivals and Attractions - Knowing stuff to see and stuff to do is becoming more and more important for people as attention spans grow shorter and shorter.  After all, you can only blow up people in Halo for so long before it all starts to get a little boring.  Again, in Issaquah alone we have weekend farmer's markets, Salmon Days, Library book sales, tons of events at Lake Sammamish, and we're less than 20 minutes from both downtown Seattle or, heading the other direction, the beautiful Snoqualmie falls.  Don't think there's anything special to see or do where you are?  You're talking to a girl who grew up in a town with a population of 2000 people, and we still had a yearly "Riverless Festival" as well as playing host to "Kansas' Biggest Rodeo," and tons of other events.  Every locality has it's own flavor, you just have to be willing to sell the taste.  No matter how bad you think you have it, remember this: Kirwin, Kansas - 12 miles from where I grew up, population of 150 people in a good year- is PROUDLY known as, "The Goose Capital of Kansas."  (And yes, I know western Kansas is a weird world.  I've come to terms with it and so should you.)
• Local Little Knowns- Did you know that King County, Washington has the lowest rate of death by heart attack of anywhere in the United States?  Our EMS response time is amazing out here due to great city planning and awesome training.  The average time it takes from a 911 call to the response team arrival is less than 5 minutes.  Will that sell you an apartment?  Well, that depends on whether or not the person you're talking to has had a heart attack before, something that we don't ask as we fill out the guest card.  Knowing trivia about your location might seem trivial, but people are fascinated by little known stuff.  It makes us feel smart when we drop it in to a conversation later and amaze the people around us.  Where movies were filmed, where famous people live, eat and shop, how many hiking trails there are on each mountain, etc.  All of this stuff endears you to your potential resident.

One of the great uses for these things comes when it's newsletter creation time.  Since I discourage ever printing filler articles (because your residents do not WANT another word search or recipe for zucchini bread!), it can be a little difficult to fill the pages sometimes.  Focusing on your local community can have great effects on your resident retention as it always gives you something to talk about!

There is something special about every place, even if it's harder to find in some places. At your next staff meeting, try this exercise to help your sales team:  Everyone gets a piece of paper and a pencil, and, in 5 minutes , they list every gem factor of your area that they can think of.  At the end of five minutes, you go around the table and read your lists, everyone crossing off the things that other people listed.  The person with the most points wins a prize, but the real prize is that your team has just created a master list of great community selling points to make your tours and connections with future renters far more memorable and MUCH stronger!

Heather is a consultant, speaker, and trainer in the Seattle area with BTLD Consulting.  Check out more of her property management ideas at www.behindtheleasingdesk.com !

or at least the world of great online collaboration!

Google Wave isn't a brand new tool, but it's still in that super elite, gotta-have-an-invite-to-use-it phase of Google development, much the way that Gmail was upon its initial launch, so if you haven't been invited to try it or want to see what all the hubbub is about it, click here and apply for an invitation. If you don't know what Wave is/does, check out this short video. I'd give one of my allotted invites, but they've now been reserved for members of my apartment association, the Washington Multi Family Housing Association, here in beautiful Seattle! 

That's right, I'm doing everything in my power to get WMFHA to catch the wave!  So just why do I think that my apartment association should be utilizing Google Wave?  

• It's a natural tool for committees that have too much to do, not enough communication and people who can't make every meeting.  Posting a proposed meeting agenda to Wave before the meeting allows for instant changes and for committee members to add ideas, or even discuss some of those ideas before they are added to the agenda if they do not really need to take time out of the meeting. Additionally, running Wave during the meeting while hosting absent members through either the Google Voice or Google Video apps makes the likelihood of attendance higher on some of those crazy meeting days
• Wave allows for two people who are spearheading a project to work on it, and still have the committee chair or director/board members watch the feed to know what's going on if they need to.  Wave's ability to respond to conversations in thread format allows board members or association directors to clarify points, redirect progress and to answer questions in a forum that does not allow for a misinterpretation of the answer given.
• Constant status feeds of the progress (or lack there of) let leaders know if the projects are moving forward or if they've stymied, as so many do.  This information might also be exceptionally helpful for catching those small roadblocks and finding ways around them before they completely stop a project and people lose interest and wander off
• Since studies have shown that Gen Y works excellently in a collaborative environment, why not use a tool that will encourage participation from those "leaders of tomorrow" that we need to tap before all of our baby boomers retire?
• It's FREE, whereas for many online collaboration software solutions, you'll be laying down some serious cash.  Free fits in any budget.

 

Heather is a consultant, speaker, and trainer in the Seattle area with BTLD Consulting.  Check out more of her property management ideas at www.behindtheleasingdesk.com !