apartments.com

I read about this two years ago and actually met a gentleman from England that worked with the technology. It was highly fascinating. He told me that at sometime in the near future it would not be uncommon for the worlds best brain surgeon to operate from say, England, on a patient in New York. He would simply place his hands in these highly technical and precise gloves and while watching a life-size wall of video transmitted over the grid he would preform operations. The operating instruments would be controlled by the surgeon over the GRID. Can you say WOW!

Could you imagine the uses in our business? Someone could frankly meet our leasing professionals live and real time via the GRID. We could tour them through the community using pre-recorded movies all the while the agent is providing real time narrative and answering questions along the way. All the while the prospect is setting at home in their pajamas. And or if they felt the need they could use the GRID to camera in. Entire leasing transactions could happen without the prospect or leasing consultant leaving their respective chairs.

We have a very smart community developing on our blog; what are your thoughts on this? [read more about GRID technology here]

Technorati Tags: GRID technology, apartment marketing, mike brewer

This ruling could have far reaching and unintended consequences. It will be interesting to watch this play out.

I hope everyone has a compelling weekend be it planned or spontaneous. M

Roommates.com can be sued for violating fair housing laws, court rules

The website requires users to provide information, including their race and sexual orientation, which could foster housing discrimination.

The law may temper the freewheeling nature of the Internet after all.

The
9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday that a website may
be found liable for violating fair housing laws by matching roommates
according to gender, sexual orientation and parenthood.

Federal
law protecting websites “was not meant to create a lawless, no-man’s
land on the Internet,” the court in San Francisco said in an 8-3
ruling.

The judges said a site called Roommates.com may be brought to trial for
possibly violating anti-discrimination laws because it requires users
to provide information about gender, sexual orientation and whether
they have children, and then uses the information to screen people for
matches. [L.A. Times Article]

Technorati Tags: roommates.com, roommates, apartments, multifamily, mike brewer

I wonder: Should Forrent.com, apartmentguide.com and apartments.com begin to build on-line communities for our residents? Should they harvest user information in an effort to follow residents beyond the point of purchase like rent.com does? One would argue that they would rob from their credibility with advertisers and I would argue that if you are taking care of residents it really doesn’t matter.

Would it be advantageous for them to build portals for property management companies in lieu of companies doing for themselves? Wouldn’t it be smart to add value to both the consumer of their products as well as the consumers that use them. It’s kind of B2B2C business to business to consumer. Somehow the three entities have to merge in a synergistic relationship that lasts well beyond move in. It has to be done without the intent to cannibalize our community base like rent.com does.

That said, they could take a space like mypad and instead of or better, in addition to being just a blog they could turn it into a social media community that apartment residents all across the country subscribed or became members of. The community would have the blog, a forum, links to forent.com, useful tips on moving, resident-management relations, etc…

Here is my logic: the more sites we see that pay residents to move (like rent.com or apartmenthomeliving.com) the less relevant forrent.com, apartments.com or apartmentguide.com become. I’m not suggesting they go away. No way. All are very reputable and solid companies with brand recognition. However at some point it makes more sense for the consumer to take a check to move than it does to commit to a product via a non-paying source. Especially in light of $4.00 gas.