Technology

A Dark and Virtual Storm Still on the Horizon?

It was a dark day on Wednesday, January 18, 2012—for some of us more than others.
Murphy’s Law was in full effect the moment my feet hit the ground that morning, and the string of mishaps continued when I got to work and turned on my computer. I opened Google to check my email, and I saw a thick, black bar covering the logo at the top of the page.

By Phoebe Chongchua, SD Real Estate Help, San Diego, CA

It’s the kind of job that requires a lot of patience, and today being a property manager also requires keeping up with technology. Property managers work with many different personalities, which requires them to have some important skills that help make the job of managing properties a success. But they also need to keep up with where their future tenants are spending their time–online.

Get Social.

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.

And I'm not talking the married kind of engagement. (although that can be pretty pricey too)

I'm talking the price of engagement in regards to social media. I was not a bandwagon social media user. I wanted to understand how to engage and converse with our residents and potential residents before I jumped on the social media train. I also wanted to understand how to measure engagement and then translate that to value for our clients. 

For me, the  issue with social media is not the time it takes to post, blog or tweet, the issue is engagement. Are you maximizing on opportunities of engagement? Are you talking at your residents and prospects are talking with them? Having thousands of fans or followers are great but what are you doing with them?

What gives you the best engagement bang for you buck? I have included my top three.

DON'T BE A NEWS FEED HOG

Posting and tweeting are a marathon, not a race. If you clog up their news feed, they are sure to unfollow or unsubscribe. Studies show a post every 3-4 hours is the sweet spot.

INSIGHTS

Are you looking at your insights page? Your insights page has a wealth of information and demographics. Use that to your advantage when posting. 

FEEDBACK SCORE

Look at your most successful post (in terms of likes, comments, impressions, re-tweets, etc) and figure out your feedback score. For the posts with the highest feedback percentage, do you see a pattern of posts people engage with most... sports, fashion, decorating ideas? 

I benchmark everything. As a Director of Marketing, making sure my marketing team's time is well spent requires just that, benchmarking everything. Have we figured out the secret formula to social media, engagement and ROI.. not yet but I'm working on it. :-)

Happy posting!

Sparkle Hammond, M.Ed.  First Communities | Director of Marketing
shammond@firstcommunities.net
www.century-apartments.com | www.facebook.com/centuryapartmenthomes

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?

Accepting credit cards for rental payments has been a hotly contested item in the office since Twitter published its first tweet. I'd like to get your opinion on it - not because I want to win some office bet (1/2 day off!) but because I still think this is a sticking point for some companies. Let's clear the air, check the evidence and try to figure out what we should do.

Pay a convenience fee for being convenienced.

Quick math. If you collected $10 million dollars a month in rents and that was all paid by credit card at 2.5% per transaction that would be $250,000 a month you'd flush down the toilet. It isn't practical for our bottom lines to write these kinds of numbers off. (Shoot if it was, I'd process the transactions using some crayons and a phone and keep the $250,000 myself). Only way you can overcome these lopsided mathematics is to charge a convenience fee. The trouble is the laws regarding the fees are pretty convoluted and require a decoder ring and expensive lawyers to understand. 

Here's the skinny: Discover (the card that pays you back) doesn't care who you charge a convenience to just as long as it isn't higher than what they're charging you per transaction. MASTERCARD says:

So, you've read through countless fun blogs from within and outside the industry and yes, you've smiled to yourself as you've had to thumb through silly posts about the author's dogs or sunglasses and/or other gimmicky things to keep you reading. And yes, you've gone a step above and read through more authoritative beats like Mashable or TechCrunch or HBR to yes, still find yourself having to smile and get through gimmicky articles on social media. 

And in that time frame of lost minutes  (and yes, hours), you were trained over and over to think that social media was about #fans #followers #tweets #comments #posts and other "measurements". Well, guess what they were wrong and you were wrong to believe it. These vanity metrics simply don't add up to leases or renewals. At the very stretch, they are ONLY good for brand lift, which you likely will ONLY consider once you can DEMONSTRATE you have a handle on building true marketing and leasing ROI. Otherwise, I give it to your boss to tell you to eat it and find something else better to do with your time.

And the reason is simple, we as an industry need to spend the very little time we do have to market (how many of you truly have a full-time dedicated marketing manager on site???) on getting a return from it. 

No matter how you create one, be in on an iPad, a website, a piece of paper, or your Etch A Sketch, the guest card is the fundamental way to understand a prospect's needs and get them to move-in. As we enter the slow season and rush to find ways to drive more leads, I wanted to stop a minute and look at our current prospect cards and see if we were doing everything we could to convert. Here are some of the things I found:

Not responding to prospects fast enough.

According to the Harvard Business review survey from March 2011 - "Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer." It's easy to see the logic behind this argument right? Your quick response is received by the prospect when they are still in front of their devices!

It's so hard for us to follow up immediately though; an agent is giving a tour, making phone calls, baking cookies, doing the daily grind. If prospects expect an immediate response and our people are busy, it's easy to see why our email lead conversions as an industry are dismal. Are our industry averages low because we haven't found a way to respond fast enough? Prime example of this slow response I took from this actual rejected guest card (some of the info changed to protect the guilty):