Save the date to learn about Customer First online marketing strategies across the apartment resident experience lifecycle.

Is your organization customer-centric?  Are you reaping the benefits of a “Customer First” strategy?  AIM 2012 features innovative and actionable information to deliver an unforgettable online experience for your prospects and residents. Forget about save the date: register today and start bridging the connection between customer experience and profitable rental revenue.

AIM Conference 2012

April 25–27, 2012

Phoenix, Arizona

Advance Registration

$595 until February 17, $695 after

Register at www.aimconf.com today!

Other than being insanely jealous, why might apartment operators care about social commerce site Groupon’s pre-IPO valuation of $15 billion?

Because Groupon is taking in $1 billion this year helping local retailers connect with customers.  And the number two social marketing platform – LivingSocial – is projected to bring in $500 million in 2011.  Social commerce is working.

Before you yell “irrelevant”, recall Rent.com’s origins.  Apartment REIT executives Scott Ingraham and Allan Hunter originally conceived of the site (as Viva.com back in 2000) as a site to aggregate renters into buying groups and get them deals on apartments through their group buying power.  Scott and Allan were ahead of their time.  Ten years ago e-commerce was scarce, online social networks didn’t exist, and email was still not widely used.

Today’s social commerce sites like Groupon and LivingSocial provide great deals (50-90% off) to consumers in exchange for aggregating lots of buyers in a local area and herding them in the door.  With the growth of social commerce sites, it won’t be long before planned viral behavior gets re-introduced to marketing real estate and real estate services.  Can it work in apartments?  Is there a value to advertising where the expectation is that friends will share in a great deal you offer?  Is it worth the cost?

LivingSocial is sending Senior Director Greg Mazanec to AIM 2011 to help us understand the business model and answer your questions about this viral form of customer attraction.  Greg is a social commerce expert, and a veteran of SocialCash.com – an early ad network for Facebook.  We’ll interview Greg on the big stage on Monday afternoon May 2 at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach.  Have you and your colleagues registered yet?  You won’t want to miss Greg – and the other hard-hitting sessions we have in store for you!  (The conference will start on Monday May 2 and end at noon on Wednesday May 4.

Jane Griffith, Director of Marketing at Pinnacle called recently to talk about the importance of monitoring and responding to Better Business Bureau (BBB) listings.

BBB and the Chamber of Commerce business listings and reviews are old school. But they’re online, user-generated content. They’re SEO-optimized, locally searchable and validated by a staff of experts. In other words, they still matter and can make or break a potential customer’s impressions. Renters, investors, lenders – they can all find your properties’ reputation at www.bbb.org.

Do you know how your property ratings are affecting public perceptions of your brand?

Bad ratings at the BBB or Chamber of Commerce can happen to anyone. I checked four San Francisco properties owned by one of the most prestigious apartment owners. One had an ‘F’ failing rating due to non-response to complaints. The good news is that complaints and disputes with the BBB can be constructively resolved.

Jane kindly offered to share with the industry a step-by-step process for checking and responding to BBB reviews and ratings (use link below to download).  If you don’t want to monitor reviews yourself, ask your ad agency or ILS if reputation management is service they can look at providing for you in the future.

By the way, Jane and Donald Davidoff, Group Vice President, Strategic Systems at Archstone will be co-presenting at the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference (AIM) 2010.  We hope to see you there!

Very best regards,

Steve Lefkovits
Executive Producer, AIM Conference

Jane’s BBB Process (click to download)

Register for AIM 2010

PS – BBB and Chamber of Commerce listings can provide great search engine optimization.  At last year’s AIM Conference Chris Sherman, one of the country’s leading experts on search laid out a step by step approach to improving a business’s visibility to the search engines.  First on his list was leveraging Chamber of Commerce and local community guides.

Even if you’re not going to do it yourself, be sure to ask your agencies and listings vendors if they’ve seen Chris’s presentation.  He is executive editor of Search Engine Land and producer of the internationally acclaimed SMX Events.  His presentation contains new product ideas, competitive research and insights into changing local business search behavior that might interest them – and you.  Check it out:

Chris Sherman’s AIM 2009 Presentation

Is revenue management just a “black box?”  Have the technical challenges been solved in creating a software that can optimize the rent yield in apartment communities?  What’s the math behind revenue management?  A new technical white paper answers these questions and many more.

In a recently published white paper, “The Implementation of an Apartment Dynamic Pricing System,” Dr. Jian Wang, vice president of research and development for The Rainmaker Group, describes in great detail the implementation of an apartment dynamic pricing system with particular emphasis on setting optimal rental rates for new leases. The system he describes “has been helping several leading apartment operators offer prospective tenants a menu of rent options for the last six years. It sets the optimal rents everyday, which are presented in the form of unit type, move-in week and lease term.

Click here for entire white paper

Apartment operators struggle with a myriad of issues, one of the most important is setting rental rates for new and renewal leases. Traditionally, rents are typically set with the goal of achieving market share, maintaining occupancy and remaining profitable. Rents are determined by various factors including market condition, competition, condition of property, and vacancy rates. Management experience also plays a role in determining rental rates.

Revenue Management (RM) has emerged as another way to determine lease rates for apartment operators. This methodology uses data-driven pricing to find the optimal price for individual apartments based on current and forecasted market conditions.  Apartment Revenue Management Systems (RMS) is a rapidly growing trend for setting rental rates in the apartment industry. Once limited to the airline and hotel industries, RMS has seen significant growth in the apartment industry since multifamily-specific software hit the market several years ago.

The article includes a study of the characteristics of apartment rental firms compared to hotels from a revenue management perspective. The characteristics that apartments and hotels share:

• Both are perishable products (they are worthless until they are occupied again)
• Both have constrained supply (there’s only so much to go around)
• Both are effected by advance consumption decisions (customers reserve product before using)
• Both have censored demand observations due to product availability and/or pricing constraints

However, the apartment industry does distinguish itself with the following characteristics:

• Longer lengths of stay
• Fewer transactions
• No repeat customers
• More renewals
• Riskier decisions
• No group booking
• No walk-ins
• Concessions

Dr. Wang outlines his expert view on the design of an optimal multifamily revenue management system with modules including:

• Data Aggregator – links the property management systems and the RMS
• Statistics Operator – estimates a number of business statistics based on the aggregated historical data
• Demand Forecaster – predicts the remaining unconstrained demand for a finite planning horizon, which will be fed into the Rent Optimizer module
• Supply Forecaster – predicts the number of units available for lease for a finite horizon of future weeks
• Reference Rent Calculator – estimates reference rates
• Rent Optimizer – calculates optimized rents from which the optimal rental rates are derived in the Rent Recommender module
• Rent Recommender – module that recommends optimal rents by disaggregating optimized rents

Dr. Wang has more than 16 years of experience in mathematical modeling, system architecture, and implementation in engineering and software vendor industries. He’s a demonstrated leader in operations research and is published in several top journals.

Click here for entire white paper

We’ve put together two different cases of different companies successfully using Facebook and MySpace to market apartments. After you’re done reading, please tell us what you think by adding your comment.

CASE #1:
UDR, Inc., the 50,000-unit owner, recently launched a rental search page on MySpace.  The page includes portfolio-wide apartment search, Google maps, real-time availability, videos and a photo feed from Flickr — in addition to the usual MySpace social functions for engagement for sharing page information.

Yet, in the three weeks since launch, their page has only 1 friend and the views of photos are in the single-digits. Despite this, the effort is probably considered a big success at UDR.

QUESTION: Why is UDR’s MySpace project successful?

CASE #2:
A single San Francisco AvalonBay community has two Facebook groups. One was created by two popular residents and has 40 members, while the other, started by an AvalonBay associate, has only 2 members.  Both have a handful of photos, and little other content.  However, another company-created Facebook page for Avalon Riverview has a good level of engagement with 22 members, and some actual resident conversation on it.

Second example: Stephen D. Bell & Co. appears to have created a Facebook and MySpace page for every one of their approximately 200 properties.

QUESTION: How can a Facebook group be used as part of a strategy to attract renters?

Here are the facts:

MySpace is the largest social network in the United States, with 72% market share versus Facebook’s 17%.  UDR’s MySpace page serves several functions unrelated to allowing renters to search for a unit on MySpace.  (In fact, the page doesn’t even mention its function in bold type anwhere – you kind of have to know what it is to use it.) 
Here’s what they are:

• It can serve as a MySpace landing page that allows UDR to direct renter prospects who have a strong MySpace affiliation to search “within their community” and not have to leave MySpace to get the information they want.
• It provides search engine optimization (SEO) by linking to (and increasing the relevance of) other UDR online assets.
• It’s an easy page to save and return to.  With long searches being the norm, a page on a social media site is an easy way to bookmark a company of interest.
• It provies easy ways to share and distribute photos and video to large numbers of people without incurring the bandwith cost at UDR.

Facebook is a user-generated media site in which people share information about their lives and their interests with friends.  According to Compete.com, Facebook visits account for almost 3% of all web browsing in the US.  Facebook averages 21 minutes and 49 pages of browsing per unique visitor per day (Source: ComScore Media Metrix and internal Facebook data.)  In other words, engagement is high.  Anyone can create a group or a company page which Facebook members can join.  According to M:Metrics, mobile Facebook users spend an average of one hour and 24 minutes on the site per month from their smart phones – despite the inconvenience.

Facebook may be leveraged for marketing purposes in a number of ways including:

• Near 100% deliverability of messages;
• Free web pages that support photos and videos within a heavily-trafficed social context;
• SEO assistance from linking;
• Landing pages that allow prospects to find traditional community information inside familiar navigation in addition to insights as to who the residents in that community are and how those searching would interact in the neighborhood.

Avalon Riverview seems to be a naturally-occurring Facebook community.  Its members are just out of college, and are extremely active on Facebook, some with more than 500 Facebook friends.  Since they are showing their communication preferences clearly, it seems worthwhile to experiment with communicating with them in their natural environment.  Should AvalonBay’s Mission Bay property use the resident-generated Facebook page for its marketing?  You decide. Please have a look and send us your comments.  We’ll follow up on this story in future notes.

…And since we’re on the topic of Internet marketing:
Register now for the AIM 2009 Conference to learn more about social network marketing, and much, much more.