With 71 properties in the Orange County submarket alone, that requires a lot of education. Several times a year, Kirkland charters a bus and takes associates on a tour of selected communities. “We might take a trip to the beach and visit the Newport properties, or we might visit the [seven] properties in Tustin,” she says. “All for an appreciation of how the portfolio can provide what any customer might want.” Leasing consultants across the Irvine portfolio have faith in the system. At both the Irvine Spectrum Center and the village of Woodbury, personnel are quick to qualify applicants for the appropriate IAC property rather than pitching them on their own available units. “You keep in mind that it works both ways,” Strasshofer says. “Of course I want residents, but not unhappy residents. I’ll send them to sister properties because I know that the same referrals are coming back my way.”
Once the resident is settled into the right property for the right reasons, it’s all about showing them a good time. Overwhelmingly, fun with a capital “F” is what Orange County apartment customers from all walks of life seem to want, and IAC does not fail to deliver on the “play” part of mixed-use development. The company sees resident satisfaction as the exclamation point to its “Love Where You Live” campaign, and measures it regularly in a number of ways, including with Kingsley resident satisfaction surveys, secret shoppers, and resident referrals.
What’s most essential for IAC, however, is the all-important but ever intangible property-level buzz, which the company generates in a number of ways—including via strategic architecture. “It’s really coming full circle because we are thinking about resident activation at the design stage,” explains Michelle Reines, general manager at the Irvine Spectrum Center. “We’ve designed this particular property with passive courtyards, with active courtyards; and we’ve made a concerted effort to capture a retail feel in everything from the mailrooms to the cyber cafĂ©s and fitness centers.”
Getting residents out of their apartments to enjoy amenities is also about bringing them out of their shells. To that end, Reines employs two full-time event coordinators at the Irvine Spectrum Center. In any given month, the resident activity calendar includes yoga, scuba certification, wine tasting, sushi-making classes, guitar lessons, art appreciation courses, kickboxing, and Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments.
Then there are the big events: an Oscar Party with Jack Nicholson and Cher impersonators, on-camera red carpet interviews, and a full buffet and bar that this year brought out 350 residents; a blues concert that drew 750 residents; and a “New Year’s Eve in New York” party where management recreated Central Park lamp posts and benches, a Jewishstyle deli, and a Little Italy bistro, all of which rang in 2008 on East Coast time so that residents would not be partying noisily into the night. “When I first came here, my vision and goal were to create a community where friends became neighbors and neighbors became friends,” Reines says. “Our marketing promises that; our services and programs have created that; and when people become emotionally attached to their community, it is harder to leave.”
OFF THE RANCH Gardner freely admits that providing such full-circle fulfillment of the “Love Where You Live” promise isn’t always easy to achieve. “I wish we got it perfect all the time,” he explains. “We have the mind-set that we want perfection to be the case. It absolutely is a fact—that’s what we want, and that’s what we strive for.”
Soon, though, that marketing stamina may be put to the test. In addition to dealing with a growing number of communities alongside Orange County’s expanding highways and infrastructure, IAC must be en garde for a mixed-use redevelopment of the City of Irvine’s Jamboree Road corridor, which will bring Lennar and Legacy Partners developments right into the firm’s backyard.
Continuing to embrace the “Love Where You Live” mantra and its associated disciplines of psychographic marketing, emotion-based leasing, and resident activation should help in the competitive effort. So, too, will advancements in technology—the company is conducting a targeted Internet marketing campaign and has launched an initiative to move to a completely paperless environment (with the exception of publishing Rental Living). Thankfully, all signs point to success, especially when IAC is forced to leverage its marketing muscle off of the Irvine Ranch. For instance, the company recently expanded its presence in Northern California and is already winning customer service accolades despite not having the dominance in either market share or brand awareness that the firm enjoys in Orange County. (See “A Visit from J.D.” on page 42.)
California multifamily competitors buying into the Golden State’s sun, sand, and laid-back attitude, be warned. Gardner says IAC has no plans to slow down on its attack or cut into the aggressive marketing spend that the president considers vital to the long-term viability of The Irvine Co. Apartment Communities brand promise. “For us, it is not just about finding renters,” Gardner says. “We have to work extra hard to market to the right customers from the moment they walk in, through the leasing and move-in process, all the way through to the lease renewal. The steps are all related, and all are critical to our success. We are a company that takes a long-term view, and thus we demand a marketing plan that is as aggressive as it is strategic.”
