Green Ideas

May is the perfect time to start thinking about container gardening at your apartment community, so I asked my friends at Gethsemane Garden Center for some advice.  Check out these five tips for keeping your property blooming this season.

Summer will be on its way in no time!  Before you head to your local gardening center, here are a few criteria you should consider to help you select the perfect flowers, edibles and containers for your space; and achieve success in your gardening endeavors.

1. What type of sun exposure do you have?

As property owners, managers or leasing agents, you understand the need to conserve energy at your apartment community.  By installing energy-efficient appliances and windows and using eco-friendly alternatives for floors, countertops and paint, you are not only significantly reducing your carbon footprint, but also banking significant savings on energy costs.  If 10,000 owners of large apartment communities change to Energy-Star appliances, the energy saved could power each of your TVs for 1,640,625 years!  While the people on the property level are doing their part to protect the environment, we want to provide you with four sustainable tips you can share with your environmentally-friendly residents—leading up to Earth Day on April 22^nd—that they can put into practice today.

1. Be a Savvy Shopper

Do you have a favorite Facebook app? Farmville? Texas Holdem Poker? Causes? BranchOut? Mafia Wars? For me, I can barely find enough time to respond to notifications, let alone exploring apps; however, one of Facebook’s newest apps has managed to capture my attention. Earlier this week Facebook partnered with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Opower in the release of a new “social energy app.” The Opower app allows Facebook users to compare their energy use with friends and enter energy-saving competitions.

Through this Facebook app, they hope to increase awareness of energy efficient practices and empower people to make more economical decisions. The thinking is that if every household reduced energy use by just 1%, it would cut more than $1.6 billion a year from Americans’ energy bills and carry the equivalent impact of 1.2 million homes going off-the-grid.  At this point, 20 million households are eligible to use the app’s “Utility Connect” feature, which allows automatic, monthly updates on actual utility usage from select participating utility providers. 

A guest post by Samantha Harvey, General Waste Collection, Lancashire, United Kingdom

With sustainability becoming more important to the general population, there is an ever-increasing necessity to provide eco-friendly properties. The rise in popularity of green technologies has led an industry that was once seen as expensive and niche-based into one that has competitive prices for many aspects of the building process. With the decreasing initial price disadvantage combined with the always present efficiency positives, the green movement presents a good deal of incentive to implement more eco-friendly resources. With the majority of greenhouse gas emissions coming from buildings, incorporating sustainable processes in homes is vital for curbing the impact of global warming.

More and more apartment owners and property managers are turning to document management systems to control the paper flow and streamline and improve their business processes. These systems not only manage electronic bills, contracts, and invoices, but also create an electronic library of documents once they’ve been scanned into the system.

But after you’ve made the move to an electronic document management system, how do you properly dispose of all the information that has occupied file folders, filled storage boxes, packed file cabinets, and otherwise cluttered up your desk?

As much as we talk about the importance of recycling, the United States is the number one trash-producing country in the world.  This means that 5% of the world’s population generates 40% of the world’s waste! With last week being National Recycling Week, I thought it would be fun to show you some ways to conserve waste and save money by repairing, versus replacing, your appliances.  The below infograph, from Part Select, shows the cost to replace some common appliances.  If you click on the buttons, possible symptoms and their fixes are shown.  Have fun playing around with this and maybe next time one of your resident’s dishwasher leaks, you can save some money by repairing it.

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Learn how to use descriptive language to spice up your marketing!

I’m all about saying something in a unique way when marketing apartments, but sometimes I find myself  with a brain cramp and it takes me a while to get those creative juices flowing.  How many times have you found yourself in the same situation while in a time crunch to get your copy out a.s.a.p. and all you can come up with to describe your community pool is “Sparkling”? 

By Peter Lamandre, Better By Design Real Estate, Scranton, PA

I was out and about this week and while on the interstate I pulled behind a contractor that had a QR code on the back of their tow trailer. While I applaud them for embracing an emerging technology, it occurred to me that that may not be the best application of a QR Code. Some of you are probably wondering, “What the heck is a QR Code?”

QR code is an acronym meaning Quick Response code. It seems as though QR codes are the latest rage in advertising. But what are they? Without getting into the computer advantages of using QR codes versus standard bar codes; they are in essence a 2D bar code allowing you to pack a large amount of information in a small space.

Industry-related blogs are a great way to pick up expert tips, tricks, and insider knowledge quickly and for free. But, of course, there are a lot of blogs out there. Since you only have so much time in the day to surf the web, here’s a quick run-down of five property management-related blogs you should be reading.

Marketing and More
Property management veteran Mike Brewer, who runs the M Brewer Group blog, is one of the most seasoned and consistent bloggers in the industry. While his blog focuses in large part on marketing, you’ll also find various additional industry topics included as well. Brewer has his fingers on the pulse of current industry conversations, so this blog is a great place to stop by to get a quick gauge of what’s currently being discussed by industry professionals.

Cyber Consultant
With Behind the Leasing Desk, Seattle-based property management consultant Heather Blume provides readers with musings on the industry and insights on how to up your property management game.  On her blog, Heather writes about everything from staff-related training class excerpts to tips for greening up your property. With quick, snappy reads, this blog is a great place to pick up a mish-mash of ideas to help you better your own business, including everything from tenant retention to customer service.

As a property manager, you have a great resource that shouldn’t go untapped right at your fingertips: your tenants. For as well as you know your property, most property managers don’t actually live on-site. Because of this, your tenants are more qualified than anyone else to provide insights into potentially beneficial changes, improvements, and upgrades that can make your property more appealing—and perhaps even more valuable.

You can solicit information from tenants in a number of ways: through an old-fashioned suggestion box either on-site or at your property management office, through an online form, or through a questionnaire for tenants to fill out upon move-out (or at any other point during their residency at your property, for that matter).

In addition to all this, when it comes to encouraging tenants to share their thoughts and suggestions, property managers may want to consider taking a cue from condo associations. Hosting forums on an annual or bi-annual basis for tenants to submit ideas for changes and/or to vote on potential changes you are considering rolling out at your property is a great way to not only receive important feedback, but also to bring tenants together to brainstorm and share ideas that you may have never even considered.