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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

In response to the news that apartment vacancies are the lowest we’ve seen since 2001, we conducted a survey of Apartments.com visitors to find out about their moving plans for 2012, including reasons they are moving, why they are opting to rent versus own property, when they plan to move and which tools they value most during their apartment search. To help break down the results of the survey, we created the infographic below. 

If you have any questions about the survey or have noticed any moving trends in your area, tell us in the comments section. To learn more about the survey findings, check out our press release.  For more information, go to www.apartments.com/blog.

Today, I’m excited to announce the release of our annual Top 10 Best Cities for Recent College Grads list with Hartford-New Haven claiming the #1 spot! 

Faced with a sluggish economy, many college graduates who collected their diplomas in the spring are still looking for jobs and a place to live as summer comes to a close.  As competition for jobs soars, along with the cost of rent, there is hope for many of these newly minted graduates who know which cities afford them the best opportunity to jump-start their professional lives.  To help give these post grads a leg up, Apartments.com and CareerRookie.com—the collegiate job website from CareerBuilder.com—have revealed their 4^th annual best cities list to paint a realistic landscape of the current job market and cost of living in the most popular cities for young adults.

I know consumer reviews are scary.  Trust me.  Having worked in public relations my whole life, user-generated content that can disparage a brand I’ve been working years to uphold, has kept me tossing and turning more than one night.  Something you used to have control over is not totally in your hands anymore: your public image (e.g. branding, advertising, marketing collateral, and even to some degree, the press being generated about your company).  Sure, people could complain about your property, but that was typically somewhat contained.  Today, anyone can publicize their praise or contempt for your brand by going online.  What’s worse than consumers finding it?  Consumers looking for it, especially renters.  In fact, 58% of renters, who are also active on social media, told us at Apartments.com they search for additional apartment information and recommendations online when looking for a new place to live.

My name is Tammy Kotula, and I’m addicted to review websites

A national Apartments.com survey revealed 67% of apartment hunters do not carry renters insurance because they do not think they can afford it and did not know it existed.  Also interesting to note is that 19% of survey respondents said renters insurance is mandatory at their apartment community.

Do you require your residents to carry renters insurance?