Western Way Pinnacle brings American business practices to China. China’s massive building boom betrays an interest in everything Western. You can see this in the design of homes and buildings and in the names such as “Orange County” and “Long Island Villa” that Chinese developers have given to new communities. Now the Chinese are turning to the United States for help marketing and managing multifamily properties. Pinnacle, a Seattle-based management services company, recently announced the opening of a five-person office in Beijing. An 806-unit luxury high-rise condo called Chateau Glory will be the first project of its type to benefit from Pinnacle’s American approach to property management.
Pinnacle CEO Stan Harrelson believes the company’s experience makes it well-positioned for the move into China. “We have long been doing business with companies all over Asia,” he says. While Western-style customer service is still a foreign concept to most Chinese companies as more Chinese travel overseas, the approach may prove invaluable in this evolving market. “In China, the multifamily real estate management industry is like it was in the United States 20 or 30 years ago,” says Harrelson. “The developers we’re working with value the planning and care we put into marketing, financial reporting and accountability.”
Pinnacle already has plans to open a second office in Shanghai, and Harrelson expects “to be managing in excess of 25,000 units in the next two or three years.” He bases that estimate on the brisk rate of apartment construction and on Pinnacle’s expanding relationships with Chinese developers. “What initially started as a single opportunity with one major developer is blossoming into relationships with numerous developers.”
–Charles Wardell
Payment Express Archstone-Smith renters embrace online rent payment. At Archstone-Smith, the check is increasingly not in the mail. Ever since the Denver-based apartment firm introduced online rent payment through its Web-based resident portal in early 2004, ever-growing numbers of Archstone-Smith renters are choosing to click and pay. In just October and November of last year, the company collected nearly $5 million in online rent—an astronomical increase from 2004’s first quarter, when it received $105,000 in such payments.
Of course, those numbers also reflect increasing numbers of properties (the company is adding online payment as it rolls out new property management software) but also the willingness of renters to embrace this payment option. “This is the Internet age,” says Dan Amedro, Archstone-Smith’s chief information officer. “People will start to expect these capabilities from the companies they do business with.”
So will the companies themselves. Archstone-Smith hasn’t released figures on cost savings, but Edward Neumann of Javelin Strategy & Research says taking an online payment costs a firm three cents—roughly 10 percent of the cost of processing a paper check. “There’s a lot of money to be saved in online payments,” says Neumann, the California-based firm’s managing director of consulting services.
The approach also makes companies more money. “From a cash management perspective, they also know when the money is coming,” Neumann says, “so they can sweep the funds into a higher-yield account” and boost their interest rate and interest income on those rent receipts.
–Alison Rice