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Last week, Gables Residential announced the integration of their websites with RentWiki.com’s content. Why is this significant?

The multifamily housing industry is not known as the most progressive space, often slow to adopt new technology.

However, even with the last few months, the space has drastically changed. Multifamily companies are gaining a deeper understanding of the social web, experimental budgets are increasing, and adoption of existing social media distribution channels are increasing. Are we close to a tipping point?

Gables becomes the first property management company to take in RentWiki.com user content. With the integration, I think Gables Residential takes two large steps.

Step 1: Movement towards contributed content.

The typical property website displays static information (bed, bath, price, photos). Unfortunately, consumers are accustomed to reading and interacting with contributed content. We rely on Amazon, Wikipedia, and Yelp when making a purchasing decision. Gables Residential has identified the needs of its consumer, understands the benefits of user generated content, and is filling a large need.

Step 2: Transparency.

Driving the largest quantity of leads is part of the game. However, the other component is the quality of the lead. By providing more content, you provide more transparency and increase quality. Similar to posting a video tour, by providing more content, the resident will be further along in the decision making process. Though transparency increases accountability, it also increases the quality of the leads and more importantly creates trust with consumers.

“We’ve put a lot of effort and resource into making Gables.com a world class consumer site,” explained Jason Tripp, marketing director for Gables Residential. “To make it even more consumer-friendly we realized Gables.com needed a social media aspect as well as neighborhood-centric information. By integrating with RentWiki.com we’re able to tap into their consumer-provided neighborhood content as well as their Twitter integration, Facebook integration, Walk-Score widget, YouTube integration and much more.”

Management companies in the Multifamily Industry can spend anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000 or more to build and maintain their websites. And, re-engineering these websites to include social media aspects can be very costly, with no guarantees of getting any real social activity. “RentWiki.com’s content sharing solution allows Gables.com to grab this content and become active participants in the social media sphere,” said Tripp. “It also allows us to be tuned in to what consumers are saying about their surroundings and be highly responsive to them.”

Congrats to Gables Resident in showing its commitment to the consumer.