Leasing Winter Blues...How To Get The Smoldering Passion Back!

Passion, Do You Have It?

How Do We Put Passion Back Into Our Office Staff ? As the slow season begins we tend to lack passion for leasing and the property. It's common for those of us into the industry to get the winter blues. But the question is how do we break away from the winter blues and put the passion back into the entire staff from Property Manager to Maintenance and into the property residents. There are several ways to do this and I want to share a few with you and hear your thoughts. I think we can learn allot from each other on this subject.

Lets get excited about marketing now more than ever. What you do now for marketing is going to set the tone for the spring and summer. You want to get the word out there now before others do, you want to stay in the back of peoples mined. You want your prospects remembering you every time they think about moving this spring or summer. The only way to do this is to market your community everywhere. Spice up your marketing locations by venturing to areas you have never been before. Also get the entire team involved make it a contest on who can come up with the best marketing location, idea, or new business contacts. I was recently just told not to spend money on marketing right now because you would not get any traffic, that right now it would be a waste of money. I beg to differ; now is the time I want to market so that I’m the busiest property this spring and summer in my region.

Time to Get excited about leasing again. Yes you actually can get leases in December. You know the ones who wait till the end of the school term to move. They need places to live and are going to be looking. Set a weekly or monthly goal of how many applications you are going to get. Create a Leasing Bam Board that every time you get a lease you get to grab the number lease you are on and hit the board yelling BAM. It is a blast to be able to hit the wall and see efforts of your work. So if you have a goal of 20 applications then your numbers are going to be 1-20 and they can be in funky shapes. The goal is to get all 20 applications by your deadline. This motivates everyone in the staff. Put the Leasing Bam Board where it is visible for everyone to see. You can also do a Deal or No Deal game. This is a fun one that can again involve everyone. Turn your wall into the brief Cases, have the brief cases number to the amount of lease you want to reach. So every time they get a lease they can pick a brief case and you can make them an offer from FREE Lunch to A Gift Card or whatever, remember you’re the banker. Of course the person who gets the last application will have to make a deal at that time. It’s a blast to play and has been a big success on properties that I was at.

Get excited about resident activities again. I know we all loved the summer for the pool party’s but who’s to say we can’t love the winter. There is so much we can do in the winter. With Christmas coming we can do so many things to help our residents out and give them some fun. For instance take Toni Blake’s Summer Olympics and make it a Winter Olympics. Christmas is around the corner have a kids night at your community so the parents can go shopping together with out having to pay for a sitter. Have a gift wrapping night for the parents only. They can come in drink some wine eat finger foods while you the staff wrap the presents for them. If you are lucky and have snow you can have a snowmen building contest with the residents on a saturday and serve hot chocolate afterwards with cookies. Go christmas caroling in a residental neighborhood or around your own community.  Oooh you can have a ladies night with a makeup person, some beauty techs that need service hours to do pedicures and manicures for free. Serve a nice dinner for the residents. Make it fun to live at your property year round not just the summer. Organize a community service project from stocking stuffers to the homeless shelter or going to the soup kitchen & serve food as a community.

These are just some of my ideas on how to put Passion back into the office and the community. I know there are tons more ideas out there and would love to hear them. I hope everyone has a great winter leasing season and they enjoy it.

Jolene Sopalski

Assistant Manager

Finlay Management,LLC

This is an example of a Leasing Bam Board. The original idea came from Tammy Burgett.

* Please note that this was orginally written for Toni Blakes Facebook Page Apartment Leasing Ideas - Fabulous Fundamentals where I'am one of her guest co-host. I wanted to share this with everyone on MFI because I know you guys are not all fans of her page, which I'm not sure why you are not :). I hope you guys enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing it!*