Apartment Residential

Here are three quick tips to help your email messages reach your subscribers’ inboxes, avoid spam complaints and maintain your status as a reputable sender:

Regardless of our role within an organization, we will be asked throughout our careers to participate in, lead or evaluate various corporate initiatives. After all, most of what a company really ‘is’ is a series of interrelated initiatives.  These could range from the acts of sales, operations, marketing, and acquisitions to finding efficiencies, fixing problems launching new products, etc. Generally we would like to succeed in whatever initiatives we are involved. And hopefully we have positioned ourselves for success through our understanding and expertise, our dedication and will to succeed, and our preparation and focus. Additionally we may have benefited from multiple books, papers and degrees which exist to provide us tools or help train us to succeed at whatever task we undertake. But invariably, there will be times when success is not an option or when we fail after seemingly doing all of the ‘right’ things. In those cases what do we do?

Our next step should be to perform a postmortem. Think of the postmortem as a forensic analysis of the results of the initiative. Admittedly, the specifics of every project are going to be different. But if we were to approach each postmortem as its own totally unique situation, then it would virtually be impossible to be efficient in our analysis. Over time, we also need the ability to connect the information that we gain to make better future decisions. This is the exact same process that our minds go through as the act of learning. The problem with our mind is that it does not always evaluate the information clearly and unemotionally. That is why we must take a scientific approach to the data and performing our analysis.

No matter what our role is within the multi-family industry, there is always one word which is used more than any other; “community.” Some of us own communities, some of us develop communities, some of us design communities and others of us lease or operate them. And chances are that many of us live in an apartment, condominium or townhome community as well. So then why is it that there is so little ‘community’ in our communities?

When it comes down to this failure’s root cause, it can really only be one of two choices;

a.       Either the management team does not expend their energies in a manner that creates a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere that encourages interaction, or

By Salvatore Friscia, San Diego Premier Property Management, San Diego, CA

For property management companies, the month of January signals a time to prepare and issue year end statements to their clients for tax preparation purposes. Consequently, each January the IRS requires that any taxpayers who have made payments in excess of $600 to workers that are not considered employees must prepare Form 1099 – Miscellaneous Income. Property management companies are also federally required to file Form 1099 for their clients regarding rental income received throughout the year. In addition, copies of this completed form must be provided to the IRS. The IRS compares the payments shown on the information returns with each recipient’s income tax return to determine whether the payments were reported as income and done so properly.

It may have taken a while to get here, but winter is upon us.  If you are lucky enough to live in a warm climate city, you don’t have to worry about snow removal.  But for the rest of us, winter means investing in a durable pair of boots, warm gloves and a shovel.

Although every city is different, most have an ordinance or code about keeping walkways clear during the winter.  As a property manager or owner, it’s important to stay informed on your city’s policies concerning who is responsible for snow removal, when it has to happen and to what extent.  It’s possible to be held liable if someone slips and falls on your property or a walkway that you are deemed responsible for clearing.  Your city should make this information public and easy to understand.  For instance, the Chicago Department of Transportation has a website, pamphlet and video explaining the importance of snow removal for residents and businesses.  The City of Denver lays out how they enforce their snow removal policies and what their consequences are, while the City of Boston gives clear Do’s and Don’ts.  Visit your city’s website to read about ordinances specific to you.

It seems like over the past five years or so, an infinite number of marketing channels have emerged. We bought pages on listing sites, then we created our own property websites.  Now web pages are generated for our property just by having a resident “check in” on Facbook or Foursquare.  Seriously!

 This makes it extremely challenging for an apartment community to have one coherent brand on the web. So what’s a marketer to do?

In this, the third and final installment of the Team Building series, we are going to hone in on the key skills to identify and quantify when hiring a young developer. As we recall, in the first chapter we discussed the three key indicators of success; The Get-It Factor, Communication Skills and a History of Success. In the second chapter, we introduced our ‘toolbox’ and explored the difference between hard-skills and soft-skills (i.e. the tools). As we previously mentioned, between hard and soft tools, the soft ones are more critical because they are more difficult to develop. This fact doesn’t make them more important in the long run- but a young developer with a strong soft-skills base will generally be much easier to train successfully than one who relies heavily on the hard ones. The irony is that our profession most heavily respects hard-skills.

So what are the key soft-tools to hone for a developer’s toolbox?