Student Housing

With so many online ad sources to choose from, how can you be sure which is best for you? Below I offer 5 tips for choosing a great ILS. Enjoy!

Does their traffic measure up?

Most Internet Listing Services (ILS) will happily provide you with their web statistics. Take the time to thoroughly review any report offered to you before you sign on the dotted line. Some smaller sites will even provide you with a copy of their Google Analytics, if you ask. Keep in mind, while most sales reps are honest, no one in their right mind will give you unfavorable traffic statistics. Alexa.com is a great, free website that allows you to get a general overview of any website’s traffic as far back as 2 years. Benchmark against other popular ILS sites for perspective. 

The business of student housing isn’t exactly the most appealing industry to form a long term career in. Lacking sophisticated, elegant systems and procedures, it is still very much in the infant stage of the industry life cycle. We rely heavily on our instinct, and the ability to make well-informed decisions using ill-equipped tools.

Our industry’s Achilles heel has always been the reporting systems from which our decisions are largely made from. We are overly dependent on large software companies unwilling or unable to develop tailored software from the ground up which would avoid the round-hole-in-square-peg solution. This dependency, while necessary, denies us the nutrients needed for a growing industry.

My intention isn’t to imply a placing of fault on companies like Yardi or RealPage. Heck, if your needs do not surpass the ability to spit out pre-lease percentages or handle the dreaded waitlist issue, then RealPage has developed a great student housing-specific operating system in Onsite.

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.

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?

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.

With the holiday spirit all around, this is a great time of year to get your residents together and show them your appreciation.  Here are a couple fun ideas that you can do around your apartment community:

1.       Resident gifts:  A small gift for your residents is an easy way to say thank you for living in your community and the holidays are a great time to surprise them.  Order T-shirts or sustainable bags with your branding on them for each resident.  Print some festive notes to say Happy Holidays and put them in your resident mailboxes.  Each resident can use the note to redeem their gift from the leasing office.  This would also be a great time to have them update their contact information with you.  Your residents will love their new swag and your branding will be all over the city.

When I first created my Twitter account, I hated it.  The posts were too frequent, too confusing and there was way too much junk floating around my news feed.  For months, it sat with that infamous egg as a profile picture.  My home page would have jumped for joy at the sound of a cricket.  Just when I thought I’d never log in again, a friend planted a seed that wouldn’t stop growing.  I started out simple at first, but it soon turned into a full blown obsession.  I was determined to lease my first apartment via Twitter!  It was that obsession that now allows me to share how to effectively increase occupancy via Twitter Mind Control.

1. Did you know that you can search for people hunting for apartments in the city of your choosing?  You can find people who might be looking for apartments but they don’t even know it yet, they’re just putting signals out there to their friends, family and anyone else who may be reading their post at that particular moment in time.  Are they looking for someone to comment and say hey I love where I live, go there?  No.  They’re looking for some kind of engagement (as any person is on any social platform) and most times, if you look at the post, they really don’t get it!  Now this doesn’t mean that you should only search apartment hunting or looking for apartments.
2. Create a list of keywords to search daily.  The key here is not only to find those actively searching, but also to discover and engage those that are giving off passive buying signals.  Some of my favorite searches are high electric or gas bills, noisy neighbors, long commutes and horrific roommates.   Once you find a relevant post, should you comment on that and try to sell them?  Absolutely…NOT!
3. Never, ever sell your community on your initial contact!  Instead, scroll through their tweets over the last week and find a relatable post.  This could be something as simple as a movie they just saw, a restaurant they just ate at, or even a sporting event they are tweeting about.  Comment on that.  Be human.  Your community will sell itself.
4. Don’t get discouraged if people you’re contacting don’t respond.  How often do you entertain a cold call?  That is essentially what you’ve just done.  The difference is, everyone looks at their @mentions, EVERYONE!  The connection you just made has now subliminally put your community at the top of their list.  When they start looking and you pop up on an ILS or Google, they’ll say “hey that looks familiar, I think they tweeted me….about a … movie?  I’m sure it’s still in my twitter mentions somewhere…..”  Now hopefully you’re twitter page doesn’t look like a bunch of cold calls all lined up like ducks in a row.  You need to have other content as well.
5. Search for your community often.   Tweets can be the best form of testimonial money can buy.  Why?  Because they’re FREE!  There’s this wonderful little button called “RETWEET”.  Learn it, love it and live by it.  When you’re searching your list of keywords every day, throw in your community name.  See who’s talking about you.  Give yourself the opportunity to retweet the positive and reply to the negative.  This will paint a vivid picture for anyone looking at your page.

There was an amazing segment at Brainstorming that focused on transparency.  You may have seen theChapStick fiasco…yikes.  That is an epic transparency #fail!  How about  live reviews for Dominoes Pizza flying across the jumbo screen in Times Square?  Can you say #winning?!  The growing trend of word of mouth marketing is making and breaking businesses as we speak.  Attention spans are shortening and tolerance for conventional marketing is dwindling.  Today is the day we look for products our friends and family endorse.  We look for the product with the highest rating or the most positive reviews.  A well maintained Twitter page can help.  Start searching today or yesterday’s tweet could become tomorrow’s lost lease.