So last week's NAA Conference was an amazing think tank for me. Some great ideas were shared, and there was some specific highlights for me I'd like to talk about. If I missed you, I'm sorry we didn't cross paths. Hopefully next time. Enjoy.

 

How much impact does word choice have in your ability to lease your apartments to prospective residents? Or should I say,

"How much impact does word choice have in your abililty to lease your apartment homes to your prospective tenants?

Now, if you're like me, the word "tenants" was like fingernails on a chalkboard to you just now. But there seems to be a real controversy in our industry on whether or not you should call an 'apartment' an 'apartment home'.

Whether you’re dealing with a tenant who files complaints rarely or frequently, due diligence is always essential. Tracking and addressing tenant complaints in a timely manner is important not only for keeping your tenants safe and happy, but also for protecting yourself and your property in the long run.

1.    Encourage tenants to come to you.
As with maintenance, tenants should be encouraged to come to you with any complaints they may have as quickly as possible. Sure, there might be some tenants that overuse this privilege, but the vast majority will not. Provide a number they can call at all hours—and be sure the number’s voicemail includes an emergency number callers can utilize during off-hours.

2.    Create (and use) an official tenant complaint form.
Although it may seem unnecessary at times, tracking each and every tenant complaint is important. These forms will provide a record of the situation and what you did to mend it and also, in some cases, provide yet another way for you to record repairs and upgrades that have been completed in each unit. On this form you’ll want to include the date of the complaint, the tenant’s name and unit, and the nature of the complaint. You’ll also want to record resolution action items, the date the issue was resolved, and how it was resolved.

 

The National Apartment Association held their annual convention this last week in Las Vegas at the incredibly accommodating Mandalay Bay resort.  While this was not the first national convention of sorts that I had been to, it was my first NAA convention and there were some very impressive happenings going on this week!  I learned many lessons this weekend through observation, and conversation with many friends, my coworkers at Career Strategies Inc, and other conference attendees.

• Vegas = PRICEY!  Just the price of the food here is off the charts to what you would expect.  I remember many time people telling me how cheap a vacation to Vegas was if you weren't the gambling type.  These people were either fibbers or have not been here since 1978, but that's certainly not the case now
• A bottle of water in the airport costs $4.  I mean, I know we're in a desert, but come on.  It's not THAT scarce.
• The best food deal in the airport is on the D concourse at the end of the gate set that ends in D26.  There is a Chili's Too restaurant there and you can get a huge bag of chips and big container of salsa for under $4.  Plus, they let me refill my water bottle for FREE, thus further proving my point that water isn't all rare out here.
• That if you're chosen to win $1000 keep your cool.  One poor guy jumped up on the stage and either he broke his ankle or he dislocated it but either way, a foot shouldn't be facing that way. 
• If you want to get people's attention and their business or just their business card, vendors, stop standing behind your booth or being afraid/too lazy to get out there and talk.  I thought that part of the prerequisite for being a multifamily vendor was to be "A Good Little Talker," but witnessed all evidence to the contrary this weekend.  Learn to Juggle, shoot slingshot cows (Yea to my friends at Ellipse Inc for an awesome trade show booth and team!) or even just say "Hey, Hey you, come here!"  They want you to want them.
• The Red8 restaurant in the Winds Casino is some of the best Chinese cuisine I've ever eaten.  Ever.
• Multifamily folks can P-A-R-T-Y DOWN!  Many of the parties I went to/saw were a whole lot more fun than any party I ever attended while in college.  Everyone is full of love for their fellow property management people and it's such an accepting environment!  I was impressed at the strong bonds of the groups and how everyone was welcomed. It healed over a couple of those scars from being the outcast in Jr. High.
• The Apartment Guide people can throw a more rockin' party than anyone I've ever met!  Their party on Friday night at the House of Blues in the Mandalay Bay was AWESOME: The food- Scrumptious! The band - Very great and so easy to dance to! The open bar - well what really can anyone say about an open bar.  Open bar pretty much covers it :)
• To meet a tweeter is to hug. I met a great number of the folks who have been conversing with me over the last year on twitter, and every single one of them, without exception, immediately grabbed me up for a huge hug.  As Mark Juleen said, "Twitter buddies don't shake hands; twitter buddies hug!"  I witnessed directly this weekend how much "social media" relationships are real.  Don't underestimate them.
• Shoes are key.  More than your business cards, more than your outfit, if you try to do a conference with out proper foot attire, you will experience a foot centric hell like you cannot imagine.  My feet are blistered and bruised and I had to sit down and get off them twice on my way down to my flight gate tonight.  In retrospect, I shouldn't have worn the dress sandals, but I'm always much smarter in retrospect than I am in the moment.
• Attendance was down.  This is a really sad fact honestly.  It was a great conference with some amazing sessions and the vendor expo was awesome, and yet from what I was told, attendance was down by 50% this year.  I know it was a tough year out there for everyone in this economy, but those of you who didn't go really missed something remarkable.  The more our industry connects at conferences, through twitter and sites like Multifamily Insiders, the stronger we are. I'm hoping that by next year, NAA will have some better advertising and marketing for the event.  I was surprised at how little online work was done to promote the conference, and while I know that attendance did suffer due to the economy,  I also think that stepping up the marketing a little bit would be advantageous. Please read the comment on the bottom of this post, that number of 50% is NOT correct.  It came from several different sources, but none of them were correct.  Sometimes as a journalist, checking 3, 4, or even 9 sources isn't enough.  My most sincere apologies to both my readers and the great folks at NAA who have informed me that my conference numbers were not correct. "It was actually only down by 20% over the last time we went to Vegas and only 1% over last year's registrations," according to Michelle Childers, who sits on the NSC and was kind enough to share those numbers.  Thank you very much, Michelle!

If I didn't get to see you at NAA this year, then let's hold out together for New Orleans next year!  I've decided I'll be there.  Will you?

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What to Do With Outdated Clubhouses
For all the money that is spent on grand club houses by our industry, do they really add all that much value? Sure, they are impressive or at least are targeted to be that way to prospects, but for their cost verses benefit, it doesn't work.

From my old days at Village Green Companies I built somewhere between thirty five and forty clubhouses for them. In the early days a Clubhouse, Pool and all the Jazz went for a little under a half a million, (I am showing my age here LOL). The last few I did were up to a few million, without the pool. While they seemed pretty cool at the time, they never really got used much once residents are moved in. And, what to do with that space as they age. We have an idea at the Urbane Lab, Co Work Space.

What if you could transition part or all of your tied old clubhouse into a hip and cool Co Work Space that generates revenue, and potential prospects for your apartments. This is taking the old idea of a business center to an entirely different level.

Well, it has happened! Someone has created a Turn Key Social Media Product Offering for Apartment Communities. That someone, being Daniel McCarthy, chairman and CEO of Network Communications, Inc. (NCI), one of the nation’s largest local media companies, with web sites and local magazines serving the housing market are launching the first commercial service providing customers with customized and individual content creation, management and distribution service.

They are calling it CommunitySherpa. It is a turn-key social media marketing service for the multi-family industry. The service, which is provided at a fixed monthly cost, provides for web development, content creation, content management and distribution, and social network maintenance. You can learn more about it at the CommunitySherpa web site. CommunitySherpa is the first of a series of internet marketing services, focused on content creation and management, that they intend to launch through their DigitalSherpa Operations division.

I learned a lesson at lunch the other day from my food.  You would think that you'd be more likely to learn from a burger or even your fries, but no, this very poignant moment was brought to me by my ice cream cone. 

Dairy Queen over in Redmond is one of my favorite places for frozen goodness because they have butterscotch dipped ice cream cones.  Usually most places will have either chocolate or cherry, but not carry the wonderful taste of butterscotch.  As I indulged in the melting deliciousness in my hand, I noticed the wrapper that they sugar glue to each cone.

Reading that little phrase made me think of all the times as a kid I had gone to Dairy Queen and it connected me with a part of myself that I hadn't heard from for a while.  I thought about eating with my grandfather, who would always get a strawberry sundae, being bribed by my father to tell him what my mom had bought in secret and hidden in the back of the closet (sorry mom, it was ice cream!), and I thought about how eating the ice cream out of the freezer even to this very day, "Just wasn't the same."  I remembered how when I was little and we would go to the Sizzler, I'd always try to make the little curl on the top of the self serve soft frozen yogurt there, inevitably ending in an unholy mess for the poor Sizzler staff to clean up (totally sorry about that guys!).  Dairy Queen's curl is what makes it really a DQ cone.  It's part of the magic of the brand.

What about you?  What's your property's "Curl"?  Do you have something that's unique only to your property?  Something special that you do only for your residents that you haven't seen done 1000 other places?  Brand Building is defining yourself for sure, but to really brand build, you also need a hook, a curl.  Find your curl and you'll find a following!

 

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