Multifamily

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

It seems like over the past five years or so, an infinite number of marketing channels have emerged. We bought pages on listing sites, then we created our own property websites.  Now web pages are generated for our property just by having a resident “check in” on Facbook or Foursquare.  Seriously!

 This makes it extremely challenging for an apartment community to have one coherent brand on the web. So what’s a marketer to do?

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…

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:

In this, the third and final installment of the Team Building series, we are going to hone in on the key skills to identify and quantify when hiring a young developer. As we recall, in the first chapter we discussed the three key indicators of success; The Get-It Factor, Communication Skills and a History of Success. In the second chapter, we introduced our ‘toolbox’ and explored the difference between hard-skills and soft-skills (i.e. the tools). As we previously mentioned, between hard and soft tools, the soft ones are more critical because they are more difficult to develop. This fact doesn’t make them more important in the long run- but a young developer with a strong soft-skills base will generally be much easier to train successfully than one who relies heavily on the hard ones. The irony is that our profession most heavily respects hard-skills.

So what are the key soft-tools to hone for a developer’s toolbox?

So, you've read through countless fun blogs from within and outside the industry and yes, you've smiled to yourself as you've had to thumb through silly posts about the author's dogs or sunglasses and/or other gimmicky things to keep you reading. And yes, you've gone a step above and read through more authoritative beats like Mashable or TechCrunch or HBR to yes, still find yourself having to smile and get through gimmicky articles on social media. 

And in that time frame of lost minutes  (and yes, hours), you were trained over and over to think that social media was about #fans #followers #tweets #comments #posts and other "measurements". Well, guess what they were wrong and you were wrong to believe it. These vanity metrics simply don't add up to leases or renewals. At the very stretch, they are ONLY good for brand lift, which you likely will ONLY consider once you can DEMONSTRATE you have a handle on building true marketing and leasing ROI. Otherwise, I give it to your boss to tell you to eat it and find something else better to do with your time.

And the reason is simple, we as an industry need to spend the very little time we do have to market (how many of you truly have a full-time dedicated marketing manager on site???) on getting a return from it. 

It’s the question every property manager and industry partner wants to figure out: just how much does social media help build our brands, improve services, save money, and create new revenue?

I think it’s especially difficult to calculate social media’s rewards because they flow into many different buckets. I’m not implying this means we should shirk the responsibility of measuring ROI—but remember that there are benefits beyond leads, like branding, customer service, and SEO lift to marketing pages with proper social media integration.

It can take a long time to see that social media is generating leads, leases and sales, so we naturally try to justify our investment with other data, including increased page views, inbound traffic generation, SEO, and engagement.

Let me begin by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah. For those of you who regularly read my scribbles, you are used to some pretty meaty topics. In light of the Holidays, this one will be a bit frothier. In each blog that I write there are certain themes which remain pretty consistent. One of my favorites is that real estate development is about the coolest industry on the planet. After all, our job is to make the world a better, more usable, more beautiful place.

Often my intended audience is the real estate developer (my hope is of course that there is some part of my subject matter which translates to my non-developer audience- or at least helps you better understand those temperamental developers who constantly tell you ‘We can’t afford that.’). Today, I would like to remind us all of something that is very easily glossed over as we perform our day-to-day tasks.