marketing
Surprise instead of free rent
We are all accustomed to giving away discounts or concessions at time of move in or lease renewal. As an industry we have taught our customer to expect it. It’s time to change that.
Surprise
Starting tomorrow take the money you would otherwise give away in concessions or rent discounts and create an equal number of surprise dollars. Deploy those surprise dollars through random acts of generosity:
Every 10th person that walks in the door to pay the rent gets to pay $50 less
Every 22nd resident gets tickets to a local professional sports event
Every 7th resident gets a gift card to a local restaurant. Partner with that restaurant in ordered to subsidize the surprise
Every 33rd resident gets a free fitbit
Every 25th resident gets a free gym membership. Partner with the local gym to subsidize the surprise
Every 54th resident gets to do their laundry free for an entire year
Every 100th resident gets their cable bill comped for one year
Every 4th person that turns in a service request for leaky faucet gets a gift card to a water park
Every 17th person that turns in a service request for a noisy refrigerator gets a freezer full of meat
If you run a business in Colorado every 420th person to call in a service request for a smoke alarm battery gets a fat one. Okay – maybe don’t do this one…
You get the point.
You’re looking to surprise the hell out of our residents this year Multifamily Maniac,
M
WebCam Turns
Question; can I use WebCams to study worker efficiency in a unit turn? Am I violating any sort of labor law? Privacy law? Weirdness law? Cultural law? Big Brother law? Am I crossing a moral divide? Am I crossing some sort of professional courtesy divide?
Renters watch their apartment being made ready
What about this – can we put our service professionals on stage while our customer takes on the role of audience member? Is that crossing the line? When I lease an apartment, can I offer up the opportunity to watch their apartment being made ready by our service team?
You’re thinking about placing a WebCam in an apartment turn Multifamily Maniac,
M
Price
Stop competing on the basis of price.
Writing blogs has been a passion of mine for a long bit of time yet I have very little time to do it anymore.
That said, I’ve decided to recommit myself in 2014.
Most of my posts will be dictated by speech recognition and will follow no real rules of grammar. I will do my best to edit along the way but have no intentions of really getting deep into that. I am rather trying to capture my unadulterated and truly authentic thoughts about the property management industry.
The post will follow no preplanned schedule be it time or day of the week.
There could very well be multiple posts in a day and there will definitely be times where a lot of space happens in between.
I’m not writing with SEO in mind so there will be very few links and very little editing as it relates to search engine optimization.
The experience economy
This post is prompted by the book that I’m reading called the Experience economy. It’s written by Joseph Piening and James Gilmore and is Roughly three years old.
“THIS BOOK OFFERS AN ESCAPE FROM THE ALL TOO EASY PRACTICE OF COMPETING ON THE BASIS OF PRICE”
The above quote caught my eye in the sense that any time you get into a discussion about reducing prices you are in essence, commoditizing your product or offering.
In property management we inevitably end up competing on price. Admit it – if all else fails you drop the price. It’s that simple.
With that said I have a question for you.
What would you do differently if you charged for an apartment tour?
You’re getting back into blogging Multifamily maniac,
M
Bad Grammar No Hire
I typically see two camps when it comes to bad grammar. The call-you-out-on-twitter-in-front-of-the-world-grammar-masters-of-the-
universe. And the people-who-couldn’t-care-less-on-Tuesday-after-5p-masters-of-fluidity. Count me in that group for the most part. It’s just not something that rings my bell. It doesn’t make me think more or less of you if you can use the word circumlocutory property in a sentence. Or if you misuse its where an it’s should be. I don’t judge your ability to be exact or precise based on your ability to put to words together in a sentence. But some people do.
I ran across a post over at Harvard Business Review titled I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why. and it took my head spinning in a thousand directions. No offense to the author but I did hurl some insults. Not attacking him personally but rather self-remarking on his premise. A premise which is very sound by the way. At least as it relates to the line of work he hires people for. But the article is not the truly interesting part. The sum 3000+ comments the article has loaded up is fascinating to me. They are all over the board grounded in both awesomeness and masterfully inane anti-brilliance. I really urge you to click over and read a few hundred of them if you have the time.
What Would You Do
I’m not the first to admit that grammar is important. More well put, it would likely rank very low on my list of qualifying attributes for deciding to hire someone. Call me crazy but some of the hardest (smartest) property management people I have ever worked with or for are grammatically challenged. That is up and down the chain of command if you believe in such a structure. And I would not deduce it to lack of attention to detail. They just have a challenge with the written word.
How about you? Would you take the hard-line approach that the author of the article takes:
On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?
Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use “it’s,” then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.
Or do you take a more relaxed all-encompassing approach in your hiring decisions?
Your really curious about the grammar conversation multifamily maniac,
M
Alignment
Are you the kind of apartment community that people would go out of their way for? Would they demand to live there at any cost?
Are you the kind of property management company that any client would demand to have you represent them?
How
If you want that then be this – picky. Be picky about alignment. Be picky about who you align yourself with. Be picky about who allow your company to get align. Be picky about the ancillary service companies you align yourself with. It all matters.
Your being more mindful about who and what I align with Multifamily Maniac,
M
