Multifamily Technology Myths and Realities

Perhaps no area of multifamily tech has received more attention over the past year than social media. With “fan pages” for apartment communities littering the Facebook landscape and management companies tweeting about their latest lease promotions with second-to-second frequency on Twitter and other micro-blogging sites, it’s hard not to get caught up in the whirling dervish of multifamily’s social media obsession.

“It’s gotten to the point where you’ve got to do it,” says Andrew Marshall, chief information officer at Philadelphia-based Campus Apartments, whose core college demographic is the mainstay of Facebook’s user base. “You’ve got to be visible on social media [sites] because, although it’s extremely intangible, there’s no doubt it has an impact on new resident engagement.”

Still, it’s unclear exactly how large that impact is. In a survey of 11,905 apartment residents—individuals living at properties owned or managed by four of Multifamily Executive’s Top 50 apartment firms as well as one large regional operator—Houston-based J. Turner Research found that 92 percent of residents had never visited an apartment community’s page, whether on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Orkut. “With all the excitement that we’ve seen in the industry regarding social media, these numbers are shocking,” says J. Turner’s president Joseph Batdorf. “On its face, unless these numbers grow significantly, this has all been much ado about nothing.” Indeed, Highlands Ranch, Colo.-based REIT UDR, which owns 45,000 units nationally, has only recently began creating Facebook pages for a handful of its properties; the firm has yet to see a justification for doing so portfolio-wide.

“Often, when you go to a community’s fan page, you see that they only have five or six people there. What that says is people don’t go to those types of pages looking for content,” says Steve Taraborelli, vice president of marketing at UDR. “On the other hand, third-party sites such as ApartmentRatings.com and Yelp! have commanded a lot of online respect.” UDR tends to pay more attention to those third-party sites, Taraborelli says, where it can effectively manage its online reputation and respond to problems. “The main goal for us is to listen to our customers,” he adds.

That said, the goal of developing a social media presence for properties isn’t to drive traffic online—it’s about creating leases. Many companies say they have successfully used social media for leasing and resident retention purposes, increasing traffic to their corporate Web sites, and improving search engine results.

Take New Orleans-based HRI Properties, an owner and manager of 3,800 units in New Orleans; Jackson, Miss.; and St. Louis. When HRI debuted its King Edward property, a 64-unit luxury rehab in downtown Jackson in January, it did so via a social media campaign. Instead of using traditional print sources, it marketed the property through a Facebook page with paid Facebook advertising and a few ILS placements. Given the awkward seasonality of its January opening, the current economic climate, and its luxury price point, the firm expected lease-up to take at least six months, if not more. But by the end of January, the property had less than 10 percent of its inventory (a mere six units) left. “We leased it up before we even had our brochures completed,” says David Abbenante, president of HRI’s property management division.

Abbenante says nearly all of the property’s leads came via Facebook at a discount cost of $115 per lease, compared to $377 per lease historically. “If you think about what our traditional advertising would be, we would usually have a significant budget to penetrate a new market and then sustain it,” Abbenante says. “We got this done with nothing more than a little Internet creativity. These units were literally absorbed overnight.”