Search Results for: 2011
Lottery Tickets & Inside Jobs
Lottery Tickets & Inside Jobs
In her famous song “Ironic” Alanis Morissette opines “an old man turned 98 – he won the lottery and died the next day”. We don’t learn anything else about the life story of his old man. Perhaps he led a full and happy life, and the lottery winnings preceded a lovely final day. It’s also possible that he lived in poverty and spent money he couldn’t spare to buy lottery tickets in hopes of a better future only to find he had no future left.
Lottery Winners & Losers
While we don’t know the rest of this fictitious man’s story, there are plenty of real-life cautionary tales related to lottery winners whose lives weren’t quite the fairy tales they imagined instant wealth would bring. There is a temptation to look at their stories with a feeling of superiority, believing their foolishness is unique to them and that in the same position, you would make much better decisions. Maybe. Maybe not.
If you have ever struggled with too little, it’s easy to believe that more is the solution and much more is everything. Buying the lottery ticket alone can lead to daydreaming about the many things you’d do and the places you’d go and stuff you’d buy. Before you know it, dissatisfaction with your current life can creep in. That is a high price for an extremely low probability. Nevertheless, this post isn’t about the lottery per se, and it isn’t intended as a moral judgment on those who play it.
Living for Big Dreams
The same story holds true for any number of big grandiose desires or goals. People dream of acquiring luxurious things, believing they will then be respected, accepted, and feel better about themselves. People who manage to reach some of those aspirations often find that the feeling they expected was fleeting at best. How heartbreaking.
When considering your personal ambitions and desires, it is helpful to consider: If you achieve them, how will it change your insides? How will you then view yourself deep in your heart? Will you be a better person?
Inside Out
It seems to me that nothing external can fix the internal. It can wreck it, as we see in the lottery example, but it can’t improve it. Only you can do the work from the inside out. Therapy, journaling, meditation, and other deep inside work tools are essential to rooting out, identifying, and sorting through your motivations. Happiness is an inside job – something I wrote about more than a decade ago.
It is a long process – even a lifelong one – but it’s worth the effort. When your dreams come true (and I hope they do) you will then be able to distinguish the things that really matter to you and discard the rest.
I encourage you to work from the inside out.
How are you making your inside work a priority? Share your stories with us!
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Changing Perspective
In March 2011, I wrote about changing up the way you think about prospects and residents. “Prospects and residents are human beings and or people first. Think of it this way, treat them as prospects or consumers and you are treating them according to your needs. Turn that around and treat them as people or humans and you are treating them according to their needs.”
Earlier this year the post Business is Personal, discussed being in service of the whole humans who work for and serve the business. On the surface, these two admonitions may appear to be in conflict, but I believe they are two sides of the same coin.
Hot Under The Collar
Many times, when a resident calls the home office, the caller is hot under the collar, feeling that their needs haven’t been met or that they have fundamentally been disrespected. The follow-up conversation with the site team often runs along the same lines – they feel that the resident violated policy, was rude, and want to know that the company ‘has their back’ in the conflict – often quoting some form of evidence that they were right, and the resident is wrong.
In this right vs. wrong mindset, there are no winners. Either/or is almost always a sucker’s choice and leaves at least one party feeling maligned and misunderstood.
Pressing Buttons
I know from personal experience that some residents seem to press all the buttons and when that happens, it is easy to get caught up in an emotional hailstorm. But when my buttons are pressed, it is MY responsibility. How I manage those feelings and how I respond are completely within my control. It isn’t the resident’s fault if I ‘lose it’. To paraphrase Viktor Frankl, there is power in the space between stimulus and response. We have the power to choose and, in our response lies the opportunity for growth.
When a business accepts the responsibility to act in service of its team members with a culture that actively removes barriers to healthy communication, it promotes a standard of psychological safety. In that climate, it becomes easier to engage in difficult conversations and team members learn how to resolve conflicts without defaulting to triggered emotional responses.
You Win – I Win – We Win
When the overall stated goal is to generate better outcomes for everyone instead of winning at all costs, it increases the likelihood that residents will feel heard, and their issues will be resolved in a way that benefits them.
Ultimately, the business wins when the team members do, and we all benefit when our customer wins.
What are you doing to create winning situations for your team members and customers? Share your stories with us!
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Rate of Change
The rate of change will never be as slow as it is today.
Think about that. The advent of the Internet and the wild proliferation of information is happening at an exaggerated pace but the rate change will never be as slow as it is today.
Better is Slower
Mills Properties, my employer, grew from roughly 5,000 units in 2007 to 11,000 units in 2011. The pace was fun, exciting and necessary.
That being said, it is time for the rate of change to slow down. We are going to take 2014 off. That is – off from growing at any sort of exaggerated pace. We are slowing down to get our house in order. We’re slowing down to get ourselves healthy again. We’re slowing down to place ourselves for the next stage of growth.
The rate of change will never be a slow as it is today. But you can take time and mindful of what your business needs. And sometimes slower is better.
You’re looking forward to a mindful stall point Multifamily Maniac,
M
Surveillance Camera Case Study Will Make You Question Everything
Our guest post comes to us today from Nathan Burnett and his team at Watchtower Security. His Multifamily Case Study blew me away. And, not just because we are a client or the fact we were part of the punch line. Nathan edified the true meaning of what I believe a partnership to be. He is not after business for the sake of business. I have seen him turn down huge revenue boosting contracts just because all interests were not aligned. His philosophy being that the relationships have to stay pure over the three to five years coming. So if there a hiccups or hard feelings at negotiation time – it is simply better to walk away. And with that being said, let me turn it over to Nathan and his team.
Surveillance Cameras – Quick Fix or Long Term Solution
Community wide video surveillance cameras typically sound like a high-tech and quick fix to crime/nuisance issues for multifamily housing properties. For those that have tried it in the past, most have failed miserably or barely met any expectations for what they thought it would carry out for the price tag. Primarily due to the fact that even with the best cameras out there, when the package is sold, there is never any mention to how incredibly time-consuming it is once installed.
Surveillance Cameras in Multifamily are Hard Work
It’s a shame that the sales people never mention that much like your personal computers, surveillance servers/cameras go offline during thunderstorms and don’t always come back up (or for the same reasons your desktop freezes up), cameras go out of focus, and that the systems are not the ‘turnkey’ products sold to you. They take a ton of daily maintenance to make sure it’s all working right! That’s just the tip of the iceberg too…They never explain to you that even when a minor event occurs, finding the culprits on your many confusing cameras, reviewing hours upon hours of mind numbing footage, and then working with the authorities to take action, can literally take up your entire work week! Many times it would be cheaper to just pay the resident to replace the stolen items from their car than review the footage…especially when you add up what your time is worth (and that employees are not leasing/managing units during that time, which is what drives your business). If a property were a typical business with a dedicated systems operator on site, this would be their job responsibility and very doable…but, unfortunately, in our property world we are short-staffed and could never dream of this.
Proof in the Numbers
So, after all this, why would anyone ever consider cameras on their property? Well, because someone has actually figured it out for our industry and has proven it with authority’s crime statistics across the country. We all want proof…
Here is a quick summary of an independent police study conducted at what was once considered one of the “roughest” properties in all of St. Louis. This effort was performed in tandem with a change in management firms (Mills Properties was engaged as the turnaround expert) entering the picture and pushing an enormous shift (with limited funds) from the way business had been conducted at this property for years. Mills Properties deserves a great deal of credit as they upgraded lighting, landscaping, and most importantly operation process/procedures.
The largest of their key initiatives (again stressing with limited funds) was scaling back the high cost of random patrol guard services and engaging a nationwide company (based out of St. Louis) called Watchtower Security. The reason this worked so well, is because Watchtower is solely focused on the multi-family housing industry (and realizes the pitfalls/wasted money of the aforementioned typical camera systems). Watchtower, with the help of Mills Properties and local law enforcement, were able to create a campus wide surveillance system covering all key areas including entry/exit points. Mills Properties was able to engage them on a yearly contract with a set monthly rate far less than what they were paying for part-time patrols. And unlike a typical camera system, Watchtower does everything from maintenance of the systems/cameras, monitoring of systems, repairs, and most importantly, reviews all the video crime footage to work directly with the local authorities to prosecute (even testifying on big court cases on their client’s behalf!). Long story short, Mill’s was able to stay focused on leasing up the property (up over 76% from the previous year of 57%…another staggering stat) while virtually eliminating major crime that was plaguing the community. The independent police study took the most common offense on property (burglaries) from the year before (March 2012) to current (March 2013) and the results are staggering:
Burglaries 2011-2012: 51 (door kick-ins were happening almost weekly)
Burglaries 2012-2013: 7
Those numbers were even hard for St. Louis County (the authorities conducting the study) to believe, but were verified. Amazing results that show that with the right push from management along with the right tools (used intelligently), no property is a lost one…
MonitorHits
I have a special guest post for you today. It’s on the topic of tracking and more specifically on the tracking Craigslist posts.
It comes to us from Ryan Brockschmitt who spends many of his daytime hours at The Laurel. A downtown St. Louis property that is managed by Mills Properties. Now, I could give you a line or two on Ryan but I think he does a much better job himself:
Ryan is still trying to find his place in life. He went to the University of Missouri-Columbia for journalism like everyone goes to Mizzou for. That journalism passion somehow turned into a Hotel & Restaurant Management degree and five years in the hotel industry. After finding it hard to make a living as a pizza delivery driver, he is trying to find his place in the world of multi-family housing. Ryan runs iLoveSoulard and Welcome2STL in his spare time and can usually be found in Soulard living the high life. He asks that any single ladies who frequently wear sundresses and cowboy boots and happen to read something he has written email him at their convenience.
If there are two things I don’t understand, it’s apartment marketing and dating.
Since this isn’t a dating site, we’ll look at an aspect of apartment marketing. From what I understand and can gather from my brief time in the apartment industry, most companies want multiple posts a day on Craigslist about their apartments. I’ll hold my personal feelings on that back because I enjoy my job and want to keep it.
Ideally, you want someone to read your post and think “I need that”. But how do you make that happen? I don’t think there is a magic pill in apartment marketing. When I was in the hotel industry, I never really had to think of marketing the product. You put your prices in to all of the channels and the people just magically show up. As long as you make sure the people writing reviews are happy, people will keep coming. And really, even if the “Yelp Elites” aren’t always happy, the Priceline and Hotwire folks will continue to show up.
The commitment to stay in a hotel is a lot less than it is to sign a lease on an apartment.
There are plenty of things you could read online and try to emulate, but do you really want to just believe that their market is the same as yours? Circling back to the dating reference, I equate this with sitting at a wedding hearing the bride and groom talk about how they were “so in love” since the day they met and knew they were going to marry each other. If you then go out into the dating world and really think that you are going to meet someone and it will be all rainbows and unicorns for the rest of your life, you are going to be disappointed. You have to live in reality and realize that maybe the people writing that post about what to do and what not to do may be looking at a different market than you.
I wanted a way to track my Craigslist posts and figure out what got people to click on posts and what days/times seemed to get the most views. I ran across MonitorHits.com. It’s a simple
script that puts an image in your post that is embedded with a tracking code. From the website, you can track your hits by day/time and by the location of the IP addresses.
I interviewed the guy behind the code, Nick Mote, via electronic correspondence.
How long did it take you to develop the MonitorHits code?
The initial site was coded and launched during a three day weekend last November (2011). I work full time and have continued working on the website on my spare time.
How did you use the code for your own posts?
At the time me and my wife (girl friend at the time) were strapped for cash and needed to sell some things on Craigslist. I started selling electronics including my Kinect, Ipod, Digital Camera, and an old laptop. I really enjoyed getting real time feedback on my listings and soon noticed that this website could be a valuable tool for power users such as car dealers and real estate agents.How many hits were you seeing on them?I lived in a small town, Yakima Washington, for the past couple years. The traffic my personal items generated was puny. I think my old Galant received the most views with around 700 hits a week.What did you learn from using the hits on your own posts?I really learned the power of being on the top of the list. I wrote a small article on my blog called “the Craigslist Drop-off Effect” describing the importance of re-posting after the 48 hour spam filter. I also learned how large the Craigslist audience was and how few people actually translate to potential buyers.Have you done any experiments using the stats that you have gathered from users on the site?I have not. I plan on publishing some overall trend data gathered from Craigslist. I plan on having general user information such as posting time vs. posting traffic and move into more Metro data as the user base continues to grow.How many codes have been used?I estimate we have had over 10,000 unique codes that have been active on Craigslist.How many different people have created accounts on the site?As of this morning we are at 336 registered users.
What percentage of people have used the premium codes?
In the last 30 days premium codes represented 39% of all active tracking codes.What is your background? Location? Education? Other Projects?Me and my wife are newly weds and live in Spokane Washington. I have a Bachelors in Business Administration Specializing in Marketing Management from CWU and am the Assistant Marketing Manager for Tree Top, inc. I’ve been dabbling in app development and hope to launch my first app later this month.Where do you want to take this site? New features?I have some new features in the works that I think will really benefit the real estate and car dealer power users. I plan on incorporating an api where users can dynamically incorporate tracking codes into their template software later this year. I also plan on expanding the site past Craigslist to other platforms such as Ebay, Backpage, Facebook, forums, and email tracking.What’s in your future?I plan on further developing my professional marketing experience with the goal of opening my own company that pioneers and markets new digital services and products.