the blog

RentBits recently published an interesting paper in which they surveyed 1000 renters and asked these questions:

1. What type of housing is currently in high demand?
2. What marketing sources are potential tenants using, and how do they use them?
3. When searching for housing, what are potential tenants looking for?
4. What makes location important?
5. What is the importance of pricing and knowing the average rental rate for your area?
6. How long is a potential tenant willing to wait for a response from a property manager?
7. How does rental search vary for different demographics?

Some findings include:

1. 83% of respondents were interested in a rental house as oppose to an apartment.
2. 93% of respondents were searching 2 or more websites for rentals.
3. Price and location seem to be the two more important factors.

View the entire report here.

Chris Thorman, solid guy, is conducting a survey on how property managers are using technology.

The survey is a short one – only 15 questions – and will only take you a couple of minutes to complete. Our goal with the survey is to create a 2009 snapshot of how property managers are using the vast amount of technology available to them.

I’m interested in the results.  Here is a link to the survey if you have time.

If you’re moving to San Francisco in the near future, there a loads of solid resources.  I’m going to keep an ongoing list of the best ones here for new movers coming to the city.

For finding a rental:

Obviously use, http://craigslist.com.

Googlemaps mashup http://padmapper.com, http://mapskrieg.com,http://housingmaps.com

Some apartments at http://rentwiki.com

Get price estimates (think zillow for rentals)

http://www.zilpy.com/US/California/San_Francisco_County/San_Francisco/

http://mullinslab2.ucsf.edu/SFrentstats/

For reviews and ratings on areas and apartments:

http://apartmentratings.com

http://rentwiki.com

http://www.sfgate.com/neighborhoods/

http://tdsf.blogspot.com/

For reviews on restaurtants and nightlight:

http://yelp.com

http://zagat.com

http://chowhound.com

For events or to meet people:

http://meetup.com

http://upcoming.yahoo.com

http://garysguide.org

http://eventbrite.com

For crime stats:

http://everyblock.com

Let me know if I missed any.

Stumbled upon an interesting article by Houston Neal, founder of SoftwareAdvice.com, called 5 Amazing Mobile Apps for Property Management.   In the article, Houston gives 5 suggestions for mobile apps ideas that I think are interesting.  Here are his ideas:

1) Augmented Realty Applications - Turn on your smartphone video camera, then point it at your property. The augmented reality app will overlay data about the property in your viewfinder. This could include things like vacant units, tenants with overdue rent or repairs that need to be finished.

2) Mobile Marketing - To start, a marketing app could perform a credit and background check from your phone. Most tenant screening services already offer this over the web, so making “an app for that” would be easy.

3) Wireless Building Maintenance Management - The app allows maintenance staff to access and edit work orders in the field. One notable time-saver is the “acceptance feature.” Work orders can be dispatched to multiple maintenance crew members. Whoever is closest to the property accepts the request. The “to do” is added to that engineer’s punch list and removed from others’ queues.

We’d like to see this developed one step further. Utilizing GPS in smartphones, the app could ping crew members’ phones, then automatically assign the task to whoever was geographically closest.

4) Voicemail Broadcasts - Start by building a call list of specific tenants — simply drag and drop from your database — then hit “go” to mass-dial each one.

This app would be handy for making general announcements, lease renewal notifications and emergency alerts. If it was a little more sophisticated, the app could automatically create and dial call lists for you. For example, the app could identify tenants who haven’t paid rent, build a call list, then send your standard “overdue rent” message.

5) Tenant Portal - A great app for apartment managers and residents alike. Apartment managers could use the app as an online bulletin board, while tenants could use it to pay rent or communicate directly with property managers. For example, after logging in, tenants would see a bulletin board of daily notices (e.g. pool closures, crime alerts, new office hours, parking announcements, etc). From there, they could perform a number of activities like pay rent, put in maintenance requests or even renew their lease.

Some solid ideas from Houston, not sure the marketplace for apps developers since the MFI is a bit fragmented for distribution, but there may be opportunity for software companies, and/or ILS’s (ourselves included) to develop a few of these tools.

Read the entire article here.

An apartment management group, Horizon Group Management, filed a lawsuit against a former resident for the following tweet:

“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

I agree that we should be liable for our actions on and offline.  If consumers maliciously and falsely make claims against a business establishment that adversely affects his/her operations, the consumer should be liable.   However, we’ve seen this happen in other sectors and almost every time, it would have been better for the business to reach out to the consumer instead of filing a lawsuit.

More information can be found at:

This past week, I took a trip to Costa Rica with a few friends including Rahmin Sarabi, founder of unclasses.com, James Gross, VP at Federated Media, and Matt Jessell, Stategic Programs Manager at Federated Media.

With collectively over 15 years of web experience, most of our conversations were centered around how the web is changing media, consumer behavior, and our daily interaction - typical for a group of web guys on a vacation. Sorry, no bikini girls taking body shot stories here.

But in the context of a third-world country, heavily influenced by the US recession, the web seemed more relevant than ever.

It has become an equalizer; a channel of communication to connect and broadcast to anyone and everyone around a topic in real-time.

Before the leaving for the trip, James had connected with the founder of SurfingNosara.com, Erik Antonson. Erik has been experimenting with social media as a distribution and communication channel and wanted to meet with us to “get advice and talk strategy”.

What came next was a surprise. In an hour conversation with Erik, I realized that I had very little to offer. The specific strategies in using Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, Blogs, Video, and other social media mediums are elementary. The technology is simple and the additional tools such as Twollow, TwitterHawk, Involver, etc can be found in online resource guides.

So how is it that a group of web dudes from San Francisco couldn’t give Erik a more concrete social media strategy?

Because he got it. Living in Costa Rica, thousands of miles from any technology hubs and in the middle of the jungle, he got it. He may not have the best SEO or SEM strategy, or may not be utilizing the best tools to scale his consumer engagement, but understood the foundation the social web was built on.

He knew to:

1) Focus on relevant and real-time content.

Erik posts regularly with interesting and engaging content. No automated content rss fed content from an api of twitter search with geotagged stories from ghost bloggers (I think I got most of the bs terms used). It’s real content from him and his crew.

2) Be authentic.

He’s not going to pretend to be a brand, or hide behind a logo. He is the founder, owner, the company, and a person you can ask questions and talk to.

3) Be passionate about what he is doing.

Erik is a realtor. But he actually cares about what he is doing, and it is easy to recognize that. It is apparent from in his posts, his videos, and the community he has built.

4) Use marketing channels as means to communicate, not sell.

He understood that these mediums are a means to communicate and engage around conversation. He actually cared about your experience, the relationship, and building an online community around Nosara. He makes it nontransactional. (Yes, he’s a realtor and yes, this is possible)

5) Make decisions as if he was 16.

He thinks about his life and his company as if he were a young, optimistic adolescent. He makes it fun, appreciates the process, and in the end, is doing more of what he enjoys. Why does this matter? Because making an extra dollar is not the end goal.

Again, the web has become as equalizer. Understanding the trends, tools, and fundamentals of the social web are no longer restrictive to those in the microcosm of San Francisco geekness. All too often we associate “living in San Francisco” with technological know-how. Sure, the entire globe isn’t using FourSquares or Vark, but Erik started with a solid foundation of focusing on content, his relationships, and his passion; and with these principles in mind, he is going to crush it.

Find Erik at SurfingNosara.com.

As the NAA Conference nears, I’ve been thinking about questions the industry would want to ask Tony Hsieh, Jeremiah Owyang, and Pete Flint. Instead of guess what the space would want to ask,

What would you want to ask Tony Hsieh, Jeremiah Owyang, and Pete Flint?

Put your questions in the comments below and I’ll try to ask them during the Thought Leadership panel Saturday morning. 

See you all this week!

About the Panelists:

Panelist #1 – Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com

Tony Hsieh has grown Zappos.com from $1.6 million in 2000 to over a $1 billion in revenue in 2008.  Before Zappos.com, Tony co-founded LinkExhange which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million.  After LinkExchange, Tony founded a startup incubator called Venture Frogs, which invests in early stage startups. 

Panelist #2 – Jeremiah Owyang, Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research

Jeremiah Owyang is a senior analyst at Forrest Research and a leading expert on social computing, social media and interactive marketing. Jeremiah’s blog was ranked 19th by Advertising Age, he has consulted for large brands such as Hitachi Data Systems, and he is a speaker and educator at many conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo, SXSW and CES.

Panelist #3 – Pete Flint, Founder of Trulia.com

Flint founded Trulia.com in 2005 and it now is one of largest and fastest growing real estate Web sites in the United States. Trulia.com has over 5 million unique visitors a month and has raised more than $33 million in funding. Prior to starting Trulia.com, Pete was part of the original launch team of lastminute.com, Europe’s largest online travel company where he was responsible for Interactive Marketing and Business Development. During his 5 years with the company he helped it to grow to more than 2,000 employees in 12 countries and over $1billion in annual transactions.  The company was acquired by Travelocity in 2005 for more than $1.1 billion. Pete earned his Master’s degree in Physics from the University of Oxford and his MBA from Stanford University.

In 1997, I can recall my older sisters saying how cumbersome email was.

In 1999, I can recall high school classmates saying that Napster will never replace music CD’s.

In 2005, I remember friends saying how stupid Facebook is.

Today, I hear business associates saying that print is well positioned.

And these are probably the same people that say Microsoft cannot fail, that Google will always be the dominate search engine, and do not get the value of Twitter.

Though we have yet to see the later three statements proven false and may never, it is this same mentality that causes business to be in a continuous state of “catch-up”.  We’ve seen this in the multiple industries disrupted by innovation and changing consumer behavior.  Gannett should have created Blogger, NBC should have created YouTube, and Yellowpages should have created Yelp.

I’m not defending the value of Twitter as a lead generating service for the apartment industry as of today.  And I am not saying that Twitter, FriendFeed, or Facebook is the next platform that will change the way we find apartments.  But I think it is a mistake to make all decisions based on measurable results.

Here is why:

1) It takes time to build and adapt to new technologies.

There is a learning curve involved.  You cannot just get a PageRank of 9 overnight.  You cannot build a network of followers for your blog with one post.  You cannot build your online content presence by creating a Facebook Fanpage.

2)  Social Media is also an engagement, communication, and customer service tool.

Not all results of customer service are immediately measurable.  I do not need to defend the value of transparency; we all use UCG and review sites everyday.  But I feel like I need to convey this… The way we (consumers) communicate, interact, and consume information is changing and for the most part, has changed.  The social web, reviews, and UGC influence our purchasing decisions.

Would you stop using your phone because it does not provide a way to effectively market to consumers?  Now replace the words, “your phone” with “social media”.

Conclusion

Newspapers have a daily circulation of over 40 million with 39% of people read newspapers.  Print is still providing significant results.  There is no doubt that print should be a main source of advertising for many companies.

However, the proportion that read just the print version of a newspaper fell by a quarter, from 34% to 25% over the two-year period.  Within the week, hundreds of thousands will stop reading.  Within a few months, millions will stop reading.  Within 10 years, the industry may not exist at all.  Though print may not be dead, it is definitely dying.

The recent months, the hot topic in the multi-family housing industry has been social media. There are those who understand it, those who are experimenting with it, and those who deny it’s existence.

As we gear up for the NAA educational conference and the social media panel with Tony Hsieh, Jeremiah Owyang, and Pete Flint, I have noticed that there are some people that have never heard of large companies like Zappos.com.

So to reward those who know what Zappos.com is and want to see Tony, Jeremiah, and Pete discuss Social Media, but cannot afford tickets, NAA has graciously sponsored a contest to give away 1 FREE NAA CONFERENCE TICKET and 50% off 1 NAA CONFERENCE TICKET.

Enter the contest and see if you are a social media guru.

So my sister is moving to Los Angeles after two years at Harvard Business School. She sends me an email today:

Subject: False advertisement

Body:

1st picture is what we signed up for - 2nd picture is what we got…

Do you think the advertisement/picture helped or hurt the property’s end goal?