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Five Ways You Can Reduce Resident Friction

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Customer service and customer experience is a topic of much discussion in today’s marketplace. As our marketplaces become more competitive and our rents continue to increase, the expectations from our residents – both current and future – continue to go up. Residents want their interactions with property management to be simple and easy. No one wants to do business with a “hassle brand”. From your website, to communication from and to the office, and even encounters on the community grounds, your residents want less
“friction” in their encounters with you.

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What is Your Personal Brand?

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What is your brand? Not your company’s brand, or your apartment community’s brand, or even your management company’s brand. What is YOUR personal brand? This is the brand that your residents see when they call or visit the office. This is the brand that prospects experience when they tour your community and the brand that businesses encounter when you conduct outreach marketing. You may not be Coke or Pepsi, but people buy from people and this makes your brand one of the most important parts of the customer experience.

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The Multi-Family Balancing Act

article-multi-family-balancing-act In every city and at every apartment community I visit, everyone is working harder than ever. Stop and think about it: do you know anyone who is not rushing to work, feeling stressed by their workload, and then rushing home to get to their child’s ball game or other event? It seems that everyone in this country is over-worked due to economic challenges, but the stress levels have reached alarming highs in the multi-family industry. When times got tough, we scaled back our staff and increased the workloads for both managers and employees. However, now that occupancy has recovered, our employees are asked to maintain their burgeoning workloads without extra help. Continue Reading →

Are You Close to Closing More Leases?

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How is your occupancy these days? A New Year brings new opportunities to raise rents, retain more residents, increase traffic, and close more leases. But how many leases are you really closing? Are you closing 50% of your prospect traffic…25%?… even less? Are the challenges of increasing costs, online reputation, and market competition driving your closing ratio down? It doesn’t have to be that way. Raise your closing percentage back to amazing with these Take5 closing tips.

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First Impressions are Everything

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There is an old adage in sales, “First impressions aren’t everything; they’re the only thing”. Many times this is true. Think about businesses that you love. If they had left you with a horrible first impression, would you still be their customer? However, those brands that were truly inspired to make every attempt to give you a great first impression were most likely the ones to keep your business.

We spend a lot of time as an industry working on first impressions. Developers try to strategize about the best spot to build, in order to create a great first impression on location. Communities are designed to provide a specific look to engage people upon first sight. We spend thousands of dollars a year on curb appeal and landscaping. Our marketing teams create inviting advertising to impress apartment shoppers. Many of our staffs are given direction on how to look and what to say when prospects come through the door for the first time. We create model apartments to leave prospects with a vision of how their new home can look. All of these things are done to create the optimal first impression.

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