Multifamily Executive

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

I toured an apartment complex the other day and was asking tons of questions of my leasing agent (who knew that I was a developer and was just shopping their product). I am always struck by the wall that goes up when you ask demographic questions (I do get that that these young folks are taught to not even address these questions for fear of being hunted down by the crazy Fair Housing police). Unfortunately, as a developer, these are about the only questions that really concern me.

When choosing whether or not to undertake a $50M investment, understanding who the prospective renter is- is actually a critical part of my job. Of course there is always the basic demographic info that we get from our consultants:

Wow, one would think that a promotion from Property Supervisor to Regional Manager on a partnership track would be the epitome of property management ladder climbing. Honestly, for the fifteen years that I have been in this profession, I have only dreamed of such a moment. All I can say is…be careful what you ambition for.

I was an excellent leasing consultant because I was great with residents and prospects. I had (and still have) a talent for smooth resident relations, and I could literally anticipate the needs of the potential residents that came to my community. I can relate to people and I have been told that I have a genuine style that is seen as sincere and honest. Leasing came easy to me because that is who I am. I did not have to alter who I was in order to do my job. 

Stay with me…

When recently asked about which skill I felt was the most important for a real estate developer to possess, I was stumped for about thirty seconds (which is an eternity when someone is staring at you and waiting). My mind raced. How could I not just rattle-off something well thought out and brilliant? Shouldn’t this be a question that every developer must be able to answer without flinching? Well- I flinched. But at the end of that short eternity, my answer was ‘They must be great storytellers.’

 I say this for one simple reason: At his most basic level, the developer is a master salesman. We sell our visions and dreams to our investment committees, the communities in which we work, municipalities, equity partners and debt providers, and eventually to the end user.

I just wanted to share with you some recent insights we gained from a nationwide survey of more than 500 college students in which we asked them about the types of information sources they use when looking for a place to live. No surprise, but Google scores highest among college students as they continue to turn away from traditional advertising – such as ads in campus newspapers – and instead go online to shop for apartments. Fifty-three percent of students we surveyed ranked Google/internet searches as most important in helping them find a place to live. Friends’ recommendations and those from parents followed at 37 percent and 27 percent, respectively. They identified Facebook, ads in the student newspaper, student activities sponsored by apartment communities and online ads/promotions as least important in helping them find an apartment.

Our survey also found that 98 percent of college students use Google Search to find information online, and 71 percent of the students ranked Google as the most important website/application they use. Google was followed in order of importance by university websites and Facebook. The students said they rarely turned to Twitter or Google+, which is still relatively new. In fact, the majority of students surveyed said they never use Twitter. We also found that when looking for an apartment, few students use apartment-specific websites, such as apartments.com or apartmentguide.com. Our survey showed they prefer to simply use Internet search engines to find information about apartment communities. As expected, they also placed greater importance on digital marketing methods that leveraged the social media posts/messages of friends and peers, as well as email messages. This is not surprising as college students are becoming increasingly savvy in how they filter digital media marketing messages. And, like in other areas of their lives, they are using search engines, Facebook pages and comments from friends as tools in their search for apartments. What we did not expect was the percentage of students who found traditional student newspaper ads as being ineffective.

The survey’s findings mirror those seen in college student focus groups we conducted in the fall, and they demonstrate that digital media is becoming increasingly prevalent among college students as a resource when making rental housing decisions. Other highlights from the survey include:

• Almost half (47 percent) of students surveyed spend four to seven hours online every day
• The majority of students have some type of smartphone with 42 percent saying they have an iPhone and 30 percent saying they have an Android
• 61 percent of students say they will watch a video that is on a website they are visiting
• 78 percent of students surveyed said they would use Facebook to learn more about an apartment community
• Email (68 percent) and texting (49 percent) were ranked as their most important methods of electronic communication

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John Kerrigan is CEO of Catalyst, an Austin-based marketing firm that specializes in the student housing industry.

Many apartment owners and property managers are curious about how Ratio Utility Billing Systems  (RUBS) are used to calculate resident water and sewer bills. This article includes two videos that explain how to calculate a RUBS water/sewer bill for up to ten (10) apartment units.

In the File Bank, you can download a complimentary spreadsheet used to make the calculations:

http://www.multifamilyinsiders.com/apartment-forms/file/109-how-to-calculate-a-rubs-water-bill

Regardless of our role within an organization, we will be asked throughout our careers to participate in, lead or evaluate various corporate initiatives. After all, most of what a company really ‘is’ is a series of interrelated initiatives.  These could range from the acts of sales, operations, marketing, and acquisitions to finding efficiencies, fixing problems launching new products, etc. Generally we would like to succeed in whatever initiatives we are involved. And hopefully we have positioned ourselves for success through our understanding and expertise, our dedication and will to succeed, and our preparation and focus. Additionally we may have benefited from multiple books, papers and degrees which exist to provide us tools or help train us to succeed at whatever task we undertake. But invariably, there will be times when success is not an option or when we fail after seemingly doing all of the ‘right’ things. In those cases what do we do?

Our next step should be to perform a postmortem. Think of the postmortem as a forensic analysis of the results of the initiative. Admittedly, the specifics of every project are going to be different. But if we were to approach each postmortem as its own totally unique situation, then it would virtually be impossible to be efficient in our analysis. Over time, we also need the ability to connect the information that we gain to make better future decisions. This is the exact same process that our minds go through as the act of learning. The problem with our mind is that it does not always evaluate the information clearly and unemotionally. That is why we must take a scientific approach to the data and performing our analysis.

No matter what our role is within the multi-family industry, there is always one word which is used more than any other; “community.” Some of us own communities, some of us develop communities, some of us design communities and others of us lease or operate them. And chances are that many of us live in an apartment, condominium or townhome community as well. So then why is it that there is so little ‘community’ in our communities?

When it comes down to this failure’s root cause, it can really only be one of two choices;

a.       Either the management team does not expend their energies in a manner that creates a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere that encourages interaction, or

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

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. - Martin Luther King

I’ve always felt like a leader. In my Girl Scout days, I was the tallest; therefore, I was in charge. When I started cheerleading, it just made sense that I was Captain. When I entered the work force as a Leasing Consultant, it was just months before I was tasked with training other Leasing Consultants and less than a year before I was managing them. In business, I’ve been in a “titled” leadership position since I was 19 years old! Being a leader is position I don’t take lightly by the way... I love to lead and I think I’m pretty good at it. But where it starts, I believe, is actually loving the role of a leader and taking it very seriously (ok, with a whole lot of fun mixed it).

Since it seems I’ve always been looked at as leader, it took me a long time to figure out why I so naturally slid into this role, in practically every situation I was faced with. And then it hit me…