Ask Rent.com, Callsource, Lead Tracking Solutions, Vaultware, RentWiki, and MyNewPlace what the past year has been like. Mergers, acquisitions, and rebranding have been the theme. The top of the sales funnel has never seen such turmoil before.

Change.

It's a sign of evolution within the industry. RentWiki represents a good case study. Back in 2009, their mission was to try to get residents to engage with each other and share their experiences. It's a good concept. The problem? Residents and prospects aren't passionate about apartments. Apartments are boring. RentWiki has noticed the shift to ratings and reviews and are rebranding themselves as RentAdvisor soon.

So what do people want then?

When shopping around, they want to read comments from other people who have lived at a community. They want to hear their experiences, and get crucial decision making feedback. The evidence for this is compelling. According to the "Getting Inside the Head of the Online Renter" survey from 30 lines and Satisfacts conducted late in 2011, the #2 source used during an apartment search isn't Rent.com, your website, Craigslist, Apartments.com, MyNewPlace, or BSitko.com but word of mouth. Where does Facebook rank for sourcing? It's used only 1% of the time - that's down by the way from 2010. Even in that sweet 18-24 age bracket, Facebook is not a place people go to find an apartment. 79% of all respondents in the survey used an ILS to find information about an apartment, 13% used a social media networking site. The key then is not to get people to find you on Facebook but to utilize the power and reach of Facebook to help them find you.

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:

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):

"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons." ~ R. Buckminster Fuller 

Our payroll person often tells the story about how, back in the day, she used to enter employees' time in the computer system using punch cards. 30 years later that story, of course, is hilarious. Punch cards? Oh man. 

Now? Properties enter their information into our intranet portal. Much fancier, less holes. Despite 30 years of progress there's one thing that hasn't changed. Filling out a time sheet. For you to get paid, you have to tell your employer how many hours you've worked. Technology isn't reinventing the time sheet, it's just making it easier. Our payroll lady appreciates it but at the end of the day she is still tasked with making sure everyone gets paid.

Chipotle is my Friday ritual. I’m not sure what it is about the place. Sure it’s delicious, its health values are questionable, wait times are fairly quick, the burritos are packed to their limit, and their hot sauce brings tears to my eyes. Every week I make the 10 minute trip with a friend of mine from the office and always leave saying the same thing – “That was delicious.” 

On a recent visit, my friend and I were at the front of the line getting ready to pay. I had done some computer work recently for him and he was picking up the lunch tab. As the final bill was tallied, the manager slipped over to the cashier and said something to her in Spanish. He looked up at us and said: “You guys come in here all the time, this one’s on us.” We were floored. Free lunch? Seriously? Who does that? Then I realized something else was at play here… this was clearly something Chipotle “encouraged”. Coming from someone who loves going, I felt compelled to blog about it; to tweet it and status update it. They paid attention, they recognized, and they acted on it. Nice.

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all. ~Michael LeBoeuf 

"The customer is always right" was coined in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge, Sr. for his Selfridges department store. It has been used as a mantra for millions of businesses since. It's main purpose, of course, is to give customers an expectation of the service they can expect from your business. "If a business thinks I'm always right then what can I lose?" People feel it's an outdated slogan but is it? Given the power that customers have today, isn't this slogan more important than ever?

Is the customer always right?

Let's breakdown what it really means.

If you take it literally then it's hard to argue for its usage. The customer is not always right. They can be rude, yell, are usually wrong, smelly, impatient, and demanding. They have little clue about your company's rules and to be honest, probably don't care. Their goal is to get what they want and often times their expectations can be way off.

Write an article about ApartmentRatings and the conversation will get heated in no time. People are passionately for or against responding. For this follow up post I wanted to dig deep and see how other companies are handling their ApartmentRatings. I gained lots of insights but the one thing I found myself doing more than anything was laughing out loud... a lot.

Some of these ApartmentRatings reviews are funny.

Some of the reviews and even titles are hilarious:

"wore-out, cockroaches, and take advantage"
"Worst apartment every lived in"
"It's Like Living In a Horror Movie But It Never Ends"

Who knew people were this funny? Alright seriously.. let's get to it. Here are some tips for responding, trying not to laugh, and when to say enough is enough:

Mention ApartmentRatings.com to a crowded room of multifamily people and you'll clear it faster than I can while presenting a Powerpoint. We despise this site, loathe it. The anonymous posts, the drunken rants, the vile tongue lashings, the terrible misspellings and sentence structure, and the truth. Hey wait, did I say truth? Yes.. but I'll get to that part later.

People are crazy. Embrace it.

When people mouth off online they do it for a reason. Some people have stopped taking their medications and others do it because your business has affected them in some way. It's the second part that's worth talking about. Let's take a fast quiz. What's your true/false answer to this statement?

Only unhappy people post reviews.

This is false. According to a survey commissioned by Forrester on behalf of TripAdvisor "The number one reason travelers cite for writing a hotel review is to “share a good experience with other travelers." People want to tell others about the fun they've had or the good experiences they've shared. It's like the east coast earthquake from this week. Did you notice how many Tweets or Facebook posts sounded like this: "Hey did you feel that?" "Yeah I felt that!" "So did I!" People feel validated when they've all shared the same experiences.

This was from a guest post on Mark Juleen's blog and I figured I'd share it on here for everyone. Enjoy! 

Let me tell you a story about a boy. 4 foot 11, 120 pounds soaking wet, wrinkled Bugle Boy pants, his blond hair in a bowl cut, tousled. When he spoke his voice cracked and the things he used to say revolved around some device called the Commodore 64. He was awkward, always had his nose shoved in front of a computer, and was a social nightmare; it was the 80's and he was your stereotypical geek.

Let's fast forward to today. The boy has grown older, his voice finally dropped into something one would consider manly and woman finally realized that he wasn't a total loser. (Okay only 1 did and that boy married her) This older boy looks out over the technology landscape and laughs at the 180 degree turn. People have their noses shoved in front of their cellphones Facebooking, emails and texts flow from their finger tips, and some tablet or notebook is being used to help them fall asleep. Seems we geeks knew a thing or two about how much fun all this tech really was.

Founded in 1995, Craigslist is the dominant player in classified websites. When you're thinking about selling or renting something, the first site that comes to mind is Craigslist. It's that awareness (and the fact that it's free!) that makes it so effective as a lead generating tool. Alright fine, we know it's not sweat equity free but there are no monthly or pay per ad charges for posting... yet? 

As simple as creating and posting an ad on Craigslist is, there is definitely an art to creating effective ones. I'll be honest, I was never that type of guy who could walk up to a woman, spark up a conversation, and ask for her phone number. I'd get too nervous, stutter some, pick my nose without realizing it, say something wonky and awkward and walk away empty handed. Creating an effective Craigslist ad is the same process as getting that phone number from someone you've been eyeing up in a crowded bar. The big advantage, of course, is you're not face-to-face, your nose won't itch, and you don't need to wear cologne. Here are the 3 components that make up an effective Craigslist ad: 

You need to have an effective "pickup line". "If I could rearrange the alphabet, I would put U and I together." When generating your title make sure you're trying to capture their attention, stand out from the crowd, wear a mohawk in a room full of crew cuts, and wear a tie-die shirt to a black tie affair. You want to make people stop, read... and click.