Ultimately, what renters increasingly want, Abkemeier-Alford says, is immediacy as it relates to information, availability, pricing, and, most importantly, a response. RENTCafé’s website, for example, is optimized for use on smart phones and, if running at full functionality, automatically pulls renters into a resident portal post-lease, allowing them to review their account profile, pay rent, and make maintenance requests online.
Quick Learners
Students who think market-rate multifamily will deliver technology that is as good as or better than what they already get have a big surprise ahead.
A whopping 64 percent of students at U.S. colleges and universities say they would consider relocating to new housing if their apartment’s Internet speeds were slower than expected, according to a survey of more than 10,000 students across 130 campuses conducted by Houston-based J Turner Research in partnership with Philadelphia-based Campus Apartments and Memphis, Tenn.–based Education Realty Trust (ERT). That may not be shocking to seasoned student housing operators, but taken in tandem with additional survey findings, the tech demands of students as they matriculate into market-rate apartments could prove to be a significant challenge in the next decade.
That’s because nearly every student surveyed (97 percent) expect the housing choices available to them after graduation will either meet or exceed their current tech experience. And a full 49 percent think the technology suite beyond student housing is just going to get better. “There are lessons to be learned in market-rate from what is going on in student housing,” says Andy Marshall, senior vice president and CIO of Campus Apartments. “Every student who goes to college has gone from, ‘Hey, I have a laptop’ to ‘Hey, I have a laptop, a PS3, an iPad, and a smart phone.’ It’s a huge change in how technology and bandwidth are consumed.”
As a result, student housing operators are constantly trying to deliver a maximum bandwidth experience to each unit that operators say could soon eclipse the 1 GB-per-second threshold.
“We’re not sure when enough is enough,” says Scott Casey, vice president of IT for ERT. “They gobble up 100 MB per second instantly, and if we went to 200 megs, they would gobble that up.
“We want to match the speed at home and at the university, but we could spend an inordinate amount of money on technology and still not be ahead of the game [consumption-wise].”
Beyond consumption, students are also multitasking communicators and expect their housing providers to be fluent, proficient, and immediately responsive across a wide range of media and devices.
“We’re using multiple ways to communicate, including via our website, on mobile apps, via e-mail, over text message, and, of course, with Twitter and Facebook,” Marshall says.
To keep communication lines open, most student housing providers are moving to wireless network overlays (in addition to existing wire-to-the-wall installs) that provide untethered connectivity in common areas, study areas, even the bathroom.
“Having fast, accessible Internet is like having a kitchen to these renters,” says J Turner president Joseph Batdorf. “If they walk in and you don’t have it, you’re dead.”
This user experience speaks directly to the increased sense of urgency when it comes to providing data and displaying it not only to rental prospects, but to existing residents, on-site staff, and company executives, as well. But even as Rent.com, Yardi, and other firms reach for stickiness in the ILS Web arena, there is a concession among most apartment IT executives that the mobile experience in and of itself is changing computing habits and evolving end users to expect task-based but single-enterprise software and systems with a simple, intuitive interface. Simply put, we want to go to one familiar place to do what we want to do, and we want to accomplish our objectives quickly and easily in order to get on with our lives.
“Everyone is doing so much computing on smart phones that when they do get to the desktop, they’ve already trained themselves to look at it quickly, and if what they want is not there, they move on,” says Virginia Love, training and marketing director at Chicago-based Waterton Residential, which owns and manages 14,000 units. “Just look at the questions on the differences between iPhone, BlackBerry, and Droid apps—people are eager to make a call on the superiority of one app over another based on one tiny step. The takeaway is that users find value in every split second that they save when trying to figure software and systems out in order to use them.”
That shift in mind-set is even migrating into the property management and accounting systems forming the core of multifamily IT systems. Where detailed, layered, and complex computing once ruled the leasing office interface, vendors are moving toward ease of use on the desktop (or, more likely, the laptop), if not adopting a tablet- or mobile-first interface entirely.
“The smart phone has completely redefined our expectations of what technology looks like and how it is delivered,” says Brian Donahoo, CEO of Goleta, Calif.–based AppFolio, a Cisco Systems–backed venture launched in 2008 to provide property management and accounting systems to middle-market apartment firms. “Everything we design now we need to think how it will look on an iPhone or an iPad. User expectations of technology are simplicity, ease of use, and seamless interaction, and technology that doesn’t deliver that in an immediate fashion is deemed a failure.”
