Social Status
Divisions persist between all-in and opt-out multifamily social media models.
“Social networking isn’t bringing in the new renters, but it is becoming a critical component of creating the sense of community that is necessary for renewals,” Sanders says.
Still, while most multifamily firms at least dabble in social media, polarization persists between apartment companies that have totally embraced social media as part of their marketing platform and those that remain skeptical of the bottom-line ROI of social networking. And apartment heavyweights on both sides of the issue press their cases with spirited, congenial debate that isn’t likely to diminish anytime soon.
Englewood, Colo.–based Archstone’s group vice president of strategic systems Donald Davidoff, for one, says social media testing at Archstone has revealed bounce rates (the percentage of visitors who visit a website and then immediately leave without exploring it) above 60 percent from social media–driven Web visits, compared with typical bounce rates of 20 percent to 30 percent. “That’s the difference in quality between traditional SEO- and ILS-driven media referrals and what we are seeing from social media sites,” Davidoff says.
Meanwhile, Greenbelt, Md.–based Bozzuto Group’s chief marketing officer Jamie Gorski says that firms looking to social media to generate prospect leads are missing the larger value proposition of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. “You don’t engage in social to generate leads,” Gorski says. “You do it to protect your brand, to extend your brand, to communicate with customers, to understand what they are saying about you, and to make improvements.”
That diligence should extend to online reputation management, particularly on sites such as ApartmentRatings.com and Yelp.com, which are typically among the first page links generated by search engines. Outside of that, however, the jury is out on whether there is a value to a concentrated social media effort.
“We have 95 percent occupancy with 70,000 units and 20 percent year-over-year growth in lead count,” Davidoff says. “There are lots of ways to drive results that don’t include classic social media outlets, and our numbers are proof of that.”
To that end, AppFolio launched an iPhone app earlier this year allowing its property and asset managers real-time access to all resident, owner, property, unit, and vendor records. AppFolio isn’t alone in that regard: RealPage unveiled new and improved smart phone and iPad applications for its OpsTechnology and PropertyWare platforms last fall, while Yardi intends to make all of its software offerings available via smart phone in the first half of 2011. Meanwhile, even larger multifamily owner/operators are developing brand-specific property management mobile apps. Archstone has deployed iPhone and Droid apps for resident rent payments and service requests, and Highlands Ranch, Colo.–based UDR has incorporated augmented reality browsing into its apartment search applications.
3. The death of the local server
Coinciding with the migration of most multifamily technologies onto a mobilized interface has been a back-end data center movement toward Software as a Service (SaaS), managed service, and cloud computing models. While the term “cloud computing” continues to beguile nontech industry executives with its equivocal definitions and promises, most multifamily IT specialists nevertheless admit that software and systems that are self-maintained and self-contained on enterprise servers are on the wane, even if the alternative vendor-hosted and SaaS destinations aren’t exactly new.
“In a lot of ways, the term ‘cloud computing’ is arguably being used to sell ASP [application service provider] services and technology that has been around since the 1960s,” says Andy Marshall, senior vice president and chief information officer at Campus Apartments, a Philadelphia-based firm servicing more than 26,000 beds in the student housing sector, which is seeing significant changes in the technology demands of its residents—shifts that are likely to reshape market-rate multifamily offerings in the years to come (see “Quick Learners”). “We have no fundamental objection to outsourcing or cloud or Web serviced–based functions because we are never going to be able to do everything. Where the cloud makes sense functionally and economically—for credit checks and bank routing confirmations and inbound and outbound SMS texting, for instance—we are delighted to do it.”
