Heather Blume's Blog

As important as price is to the buying decision, it’s not everything.

 It turns out that corn and a lot of other grains are not good for dogs.  As anyone who’s ever had a toddler can tell you, humans can digest a lot of very interesting things.  Dogs are not quite as lucky.  Harsh grains are really tough on their systems, and some of those corn heavy foods have recently been linked to bone cancer in dogs.  Naturally as a concerned pet parent, I care about what I feed my dog – within reason.  I will not feed Fox better than I feed myself, so he’s going to have to put his desire for Porterhouse steaks on hold.  (And look at that face!  It's hard to say no to that face!)

Today is National Coming Out day.  For those of you who aren't working on a student property where the world is more cushioned in liberal arts tolerance teachings, this is a day where people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual,and transgendered are encouraged to "Come Out" of the closet and live their lives as the people they really are.

Today is a very awesome day.  It's also a pretty scary day for many people.

I grew up in the Midwest and was proud to go to college at Kansas State University (GO WILDCATS!!!).  We had a fairly vocal and active GLBT alliance, and they were even responsible for helping the local high school students start their own chapter.  These people were beyond amazing, and I remember always being in awe of how comfortable these people were in their own skin, where as me, the white strait chick - I could hardly be myself when it was just ME in the room.  I'm not saying I blended in to the woodwork, but I wasn't as much my own person as many of my gay friends were at that age.

I was 19 and it was early August.  At the time, it didn't mean as much to me as it does now, but I had a really good friend who was looking for apartments.  He asked me to go with him - remember, this was BEFORE I ever worked in the industry - and help him pick out a place.  I knew he'd been looking for a while, and when I asked him why he hadn't found a place yet, he just sort of muttered,  "Just haven't found the right one."

So we set out on the search.  My friend had always been more open on the physical affection side with me, but when we stood in front of landlord after landlord I noticed that he was ALWAYS touching me, hugging me, hand holding, or other innocuous physical contact was taking place.  I also noticed that he wasn't his usual confident self.  He'd look away from the landlord and not make eye contact. He was deferring questions about kitchen space, decorating potential, etc to me, asking ME to ask the landlord for him.  Anytime he did talk, his voice was slow and measured. He didn't crack a joke all day, and I didn't laugh all day.  It was miserable.

After the 4th place, when he'd written a deposit check for a beautiful 1 bedroom apartment that had kitchen space to DIE for, I finally called him on his behavior all day.  I was young, and I was a bit naive, but even I knew something was up.  He apologized to me and confessed that he had needed a beard. He explained to me, a little ashamedly, that the reason he hadn't been able to find a place when he was searching before was because he was too openly gay, and the private landlords wouldn't rent to him when he was himself, so he needed a fake girlfriend for the day.  Unlike a lot of the other college students, myself included, this guy had amazing credit, didn't throw parties, and was just an all around good person.  And he wasn't good enough for them.

I was blown away.  I knew that people were racist and that Kansas was no stranger to bigots, but I had never thought about something as base important as HOUSING being denied to my friends who were gay.  It never crossed my mind until that moment, and I remember that I cried.

There are a lot of times when I read Fair Housing law and it makes me sad that we have to have legislation to make people play nicely with others.  I think about how when I worked on site I just made it an internal policy to treat everyone the same, and I can't understand the need for those laws.

Then I remember that I'm not the one that law is written for.  It's for him.  Because not everyone thinks he has a right to housing, but he does.  And that law is there to make sure he never has to take a beard with him again when he's looking for a place to call home.

That's what the sidebar on my Facebook page told me this morning. It thanked me for bringing my friends and contacts to Facebook.  How Annoying.
It took me a moment to realize why I was a bit annoyed with it, and why this ill conceived thank you was a waste of page space and bandwidth. It could have been that I woke up in a bad mood, but I spent all last night playing with explosives, so that's really not all that likely.  No, what dawned on me as the root of my ire is that a thank you is supposed to be a personal thing, so this one really didn't mean anything to me.  It was as easy to ignore it or be annoyed with it as it is to ignore or find irritation with common advertising, because that's what it was.  How often we in this industry are guilty of the same thing.  Let's look at a hypothetical situation: 

On your property there is a row of town homes.  Due to the age of the town homes, the time has come for routine maintenance in replacing their deck coverings, which means that your residents cannot park in their driveways for the time that the decks are being worked on because of potential damage to their cars.   The process takes two weeks, and undoubtedly causes much annoyance to the residents in these town homes because now, not only are they not allowed to use their decks, but they have to haul their groceries across the complex as well.  You have communicated with every resident in a friendly and respectful AND Empathetic manner throughout the process, but  you feel that it might be wise to thank them for their patience at the end of the project.  What is the best way to thank them?
A. Put a note in the news letter thanking your town home residents for their patience and understanding while your company has been making improvements to increase the quality of life at your community.
B.  Print out letters, using mail merge, that are person specific, but that all say the same thing, as a thank you and have the porter deliver them by taping them to the door.
C.  Hand write a thank you to each of the town homes, even though it takes a lot of time, and have one of the leasing staff hand deliver them to the residents.

What's the correct answer?  I can tell you that the answer most usually used is option A or B, because we are busy people and have a lot of stuff to do, so taking 5 minutes to put it in the news letter is the easiest thing and taking 3 minutes to run copies of a letter is even simpler.  But is it the best idea?  I think it's great to put a blurb in the newsletter, but I don't think that it's enough.  You have to take that extra step in to remarkablity, otherwise, you're just the status quo.  Option C is the one I would recommend.  It's personal, it's professional, and it's the only one of the three that is a real thank you. It's also the only one of the three that your resident will remember or "hear."    

A real thank you doesn't have ulterior motives.  Sometimes when we make a public show of "Thank You" it's not to thank other people, but to make sure we have an audience who SEES us thank other people.  That is just classless.

If you're a nerd and on twitter - and you know *I* am - then you undoubtedly heard about the "engaging" incident last month when LeVar Burton, the literacy advocate, narrator of Reading Rainbow, and visor wearing awesomeness from Star Trek TNG, accidentally tweeted out his personal cell phone number, intending it to be a Direct Message to someone else.  The man has now been "Verbed"

I didn't have time to save the best tweet that I saw about it, but I'll try to do it justice -

LeVaring - Accidentally revealing too much personal information online, ie.  "Crap, I totally just LeVared myself by tweeting out my SSN!"

 I wanted to do something special for the month of April, but I wasn't sure how to kick it off.  I guess sometimes, fate decides to pitch you an easy hit.  This is a story that's too... good and bad... to pass up.

As most of you are already fully aware, April is national Fair Housing month.  I'm one of those very VERY odd people who actually finds the complexities and complications of the Fair Housing Acts to be quite engaging.  I enjoy the legal side - lord only knows why, but I'm guessing it's because I love to argue.

However, there's no arguing with this news story:

http://www.king5.com/news/local/Renton-apartment-manager-charged-with-housing-discrimination-90039977.html 

Had the story broke on April 1st, I would have thought it an April Fools Joke, because I guess inside I still hope for the best in all people.  The very sad thing is that it's not a prank.  And that it just happened.  And that it just happened in my Seattle metro area.  The ironic timing of this massive Fair Housing violation makes the whole thing almost hilarious, if it weren't so dang tragic.

If you haven't recently refreshed your own knowledge on fair housing, or you haven't worked with bringing your team's knowledge of local and state (as well as federal) statutes up to date, take about half an hour this week and do that. 

It's just the smart thing to do.

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Heather is a speaker, author, and consultant for the multifamily industry from the Seattle Metro Area.  Check out more of her ideas at her blog - www.behindtheleasingdesk.com - or at her consulting site which has frequent new information - www.btldconsulting.com 

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!