Apartment Blogs

Todays rave is all about Review Sites. They are here to stay, like them or not and even our beloved hide under the rock until it goes away multifamily space will no longer escape them. 

Apartment operators, there is no longer anywhere to hide, and it is time to pull your head out of the sand.

Most apartment operators have more questions than answers about the Rating and Review Sites, and are scared stiff about "allowing" ratings on their web sites. As with many things that are not filly understood, or new, that fear is overrated. According to Yelp, “Yelpers have written over 8 million local reviews, over 85% of them rating a business 3 stars or higher” 

We have been talking about Partnership Marketing and the effects it will have in 2010 here at the Urbane Lab and want to provide our readers and following with examples of how it can work and the benefit it can provide to your apartment marketing program.

We just finalized a deal at Urbane Apartments with The Night Moves. The Night Move is a bus that runs on B20 biodiesel and is partnered withcarbonfund.org to balance out the remainder of their carbon footprint.

The bus runs every Friday and Saturday night from 6pm to 3am, and will make custom stops at (8) Urbane Apartment locations that are outside of the city of Royal Oak, and take Urbane Residents and their guests to Downtown Detroit, Downtown Royal Oak and Downtown Ferndale. As you can imagine, Urbane Residents are thrilled to be able to head to dinner, bars and nightlife entertainment and not have to drive.

Shoulder Your Marketing Costs
Custom pick up like this add a ton of value to the individual properties, however the costs associated are completely out of reach, right, well actually no. Partnership Marketing works because two or more businesses each have something of value for each other. Urbane, like lots of other apartment operators have something that restaurants and bar owners are looking for, customers.

When we made the link and connection between the bus operator, the apartment operator and the restaurant and bar operator, and leveraged our Urbane VIP relationships, we were able to provide a significant service to our residents, at NO Cost to the property.

It Has To Work For Everyone
The dedicated Urbane Bus, which will be completely wrapped with our logo and brand, will also include the logos of our Urbane VIP Sponsors of this program.

What bar owner wouldn't want a bus load of young professionals going out for the night dropped off in front of their venue? Win/Win

What apartment operator wouldn't want a fully wrapped bus with their logo all over it pulling up in front of the busiest bars and restaurants in town every weekend? Win/Win

Make Free Work For You

And, when coupled with several venues we were able to achieve an agreement satisfactory to all parties. We expect to have the program fully launched by March, and did we mention at no cost to the properties, or the residents!

Think Outside the Box
This is just one example of how Partnership Marketing can work for you and your apartment community, but you need to shed old ways of thinking. The marketing dollars of yesterday have evaporated from most operating budgets.

We will keep you posted on the results of this Urbane Lab Apartment Marketing initiative. We would love to hear your feedback and any new ideas you are trying.

 

Eric has over (30) years in the Multifamily Apartment Business having built and developed over 14,000 apartment units. Eric is Available for Social Media Marketing Projects for your Apartment Community or Property Management Company. You can read more about The Urbane Way of Apartment Marketing from his articles on his blog the ApartmentVeteran.com 

I have been thinking a lot lately about Engagement, and Contests and how we can create much more leverage with partnering and social media. We have all done far too many not so successful Contests, where the effort and investment fall far short of the mark.

Last year we wanted to add furnished apartment photos to our Urbane Apartments web site, and with people in the photos. We tried using hired models, but that was pretty expensive and looked too staged. We ended up doing a photo shoot, where we sent out a photographer for the shoot and traded the pictures for rent. We got some excellent photos and Urbane Resident participation.

 So, all is good right, well sort of, but when we totaled up all the free rent, while it may have been a great deal based on what we got (live models are over the top expensive), we think there is a better way, and how we are approaching Contests and Social Media in 2010.

It is a pretty exciting time, and our Urbane Laboratory continues to expand. Not only are there some really cool projects and developments going on with NCI and the whole Community Sherpa platform, our scale and reach of resources continue to expand.

We have reached a plateau at the Urbane Lab, where on a somewhat regular basis someone is popping in to the Lab with a new idea to test and try on our apartments. And while some ideas certainly have different merit than others, what is showing up as a significant trend is the quality of resource and knowledge.

We are launching some pretty interesting Urbane Lab Experiments, and as always we will report to you the details of what works and what didn't work.

We are launching this week the idea and concept behind Content Marketing in a further effort to increase our Digital Footprint at Urbane Apartments

We posted our 400th post at the Urbane Life Blog yesterday, pretty cool, but what does that mean? Well, for starters, we have increased our Digital Foot Print by Four Hundred Times for Urbane Brand.

But it is more than (400) posts, in addition Google has indexed our pages (749) times, and we have been linked to (649) times?

Does Anyone Care
Apparently Prospects and Renters care, as The Proof is in the Numbers;

• Web Site Traffic UP 108%
• Physical Traffic/Tours UP 54%
• Rentals UP 69%

But How To Do It
Most property management companies have web sites for each of their apartment communities. However, they stop there, with a static, never changing web presence. When is the last time you changed, edited or added new content to your web site? Has it been days, months or years?

Anything less than days, and you are missing huge marketing benefits. Google responds favorably to new, fresh, relevant content. Not changing, editing or adding to your web site content puts Google to sleep.


Admittedly , unless you have a Content Management System, changing content on your web site is a challenge, even with products such as Adobe Contribute. But, with a blog you can change content easily. Is a blog the same thing as your apartment community web site, well no, BUT it can and will help your apartment community web site with some Google Juice, by creating links and keyword tags.

Just wanted to post here that I have joined forces with the good folks at NCI, the parent company behind the new Community Sherpa Product and Apartment Finder, as well as several other magazines.

I have been passionately interested in the Turn Key Social Media Solution that the Sherpa Product represents that Dan McCarthy and his group launched, since I first first posted about it back in June. A dialog evolved with Dan and after visiting NCI's headquarters and plant in Atlanta, and also visiting their New York offices, I became even more excited about the Sherpa Product and teaming up with the folks producing it. They have the resources, and more over the courage to pull off a Game Changing Endeavor that may well reshape how prospects experience renting apartments.

What constitutes a great Resident Event? At Urbane Apartments we have had our share of Resident Events we felt were successful, and not so much.

However, our most recent Draw on the Walls Sharpie Party was over the top, and exceeded all of our expectations.

With over (150) in attendance, it was a great time, and we learned a lot here at the Urbane Lab about our Larger Community.

We have started paying a lot of attention too, and have recently blogged about the fact the The Direction of Marketing has Changed You should too be paying attention to these new Apartment Marketing Metrics.

After writing the post All Blog Posts Are Not Created Equal, I have really been thinking more and more about just how much our prospect know and understand our Urbane Brand when they arrive at the Urbane Underground to start their apartment search. With that understanding come perceptions and expectations about what they are going to see as features in the apartment once they actually tour. I don't think our experience with this is dissimilar to that of other apartments communities. When those expectations align with your product offering all is well, and most of the time it does.

The point here is, I think that prospects group like product together with like product, and therefore, unless you have some hidden feature, the prospect knows your product offering pretty well before they ever arrive to your leasing office. Our UrbaneApts.com web site is loaded with pictures, so they can see, our apartment features without us telling them about them, or at least, not solely focusing on Apartment Features during the Tour / Showing.

Although our Urbane Product differs significantly from our competitors, product differentiation will only carry you so far. What it seems that prospects really have a keen interest in knowing are things about the neighborhood, where are the cool bars, who has the best burger, and where is the best dry cleaner.

Providing great Hyper Local Information can be another differentiation to help set your brand apart. We are just starting to experiment with this concept here at the Urbane Lab, but we are seeing some interesting trends. Mike Brewer recently also posted on the value of understanding and selling the local neighborhood, and we think he is right on target.

Maps, Maps, Maps
We blogged about the recent survey by the folks over at Lifehacker Blog, who conducted a survey titled The Five Best Apartment Search Tools. Of the five recommendations, only one is a Major ILS (Internet Listing Service) The most compelling piece of the article was that three of the five effectively used Maps.

On that map hunch, we quickly changed our UrbaneApts.com web site around, and added additional code to the Walk Score widgets we had previously installed, so that when you clicked on the page for a specific apartment community, the Walk Score for that community comes up automatically, and you can expand it to show everything in the neighborhood.

Now Comes Hyper Local
With that little task behind us at the Lab, our Urbane prospects can now easily see whats around, what they can walk to, and close they are to things. Now, lets add real value, like,

• What are the coolest bars
• Who has the best burger
• Who are the great merchants

Drill Down
When you stay at a hotel the concierge knows the best places to dine, shop and all things local, right, well so should you. We have set out with our Flip Video and we are setting up, by community page six to nine Urbane Best Picks, so our prospects don't have to guess.

We will have a single video with all six to nine venues per community on that community page, and we will do a like video for each community and surrounding venues. We are also embedding the venues logo on that community page, with a link to a single page mini web site that we set up that will provide a more detailed description of the venue, also laced with rich keywords and key search phrases. (Note to any ILS executive reading this, YES, We are letting the prospect leave our web site for a link to the local burger joint, but betting we just credited enough value with the prospect to cement the relationship, and be the prospects apartment comunity of choice by Not Gating them in)

We expect to be able to ad significant content to our web site, and thus enhance the SEO performance of our site. The point here is, what if your apartment started showing up on a Google Search for Best Burgers in (Your Town) Will you garnish more rentals, we think so, but think about the extended Brand Recognition, But mostly, you become the Hyper Local Expert for your Prospects and Residents, which is priceless,

 

I was perusing some of my favorite blogs this Saturday morning over some coffee and ran across one of my favorites, The Social Media Marketing Blog, by our own Detroit Scott Monty, His blog titled Why Apple and Google Win and Your Company Doesn't could so directly speak to our Apartment Industry about our sacred Guest Cards.

Guest Cards are Dumb, Drop Them, or at least simplify them. All you need are

1) An Email Address

In follow up to the piece I wrote yesterday, The New Apartment Marketing Metrics, I wanted to pen my thoughts surrounding the premise to implement changes in how we track Apartment Marketing Metrics, based on the fact that The Directional Flow of Marketing Has Changed.

Understanding the New Rules will help in your efforts to Break From the Pack of Apartment Commodity

I think that a lot of apartment operators entering the playing field of Social Media Marketing, specific to apartments and multifamily start out only thinking in terms of the size of their physical community, of say (300) units. I surely agree that you focus first on those (300) residents, but your over all Social Media Community must be much larger in order to be effective, and as we grow our Urbane Community we are starting to experience velocity, in that the group as a whole start to help you grow the overall community. It is pretty cool.