the blog

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.

Can’t get enough of RentWiki? Add our blog widget anywhere you want.

Blogging about a blog…feels like a circular reference.

Enjoy –

Jonathan

“But you only pay when we drive you a lease!” To be clear, no marketing source drives a lease to a property. Your marketing partners drive renter leads to your property and YOU – the leasing agent – turn that lead into a lease.

Regardless of where your property advertisements appear, be they in guide books, Internet listings sites, drive bys, yellow page ads, newspaper ads (though I honestly don’t know who uses the newspaper to advertise properties anymore), sky writing or wherever, NONE of these sources drive you a lease. All these sources do is capture the attention of a prospective renter and ultimately drive the renter to pick up the phone, send an email, and/or walk into your leasing office.

This is a classic case of the leasing agent’s role being severely diminished while the role of the marketing source is way overblown. A “pay-per-lease” company, whether online of offline, is driving you a renter lead same as every other source. The only difference is they charge the property management when the PROPERTY converted that lead to a lease. The online or offline locator then charges $325 upwards to $375 for you to have converted that lead into a lease. The leasing agent and the property at large still have to do the selling, showing, convincing, concessioning (ok, I made that word up), the paperwork, etc., etc., to convert that lead to a lease.

This is why I have preached for nearly a decade that properties and management companies need to do two things:

1) Figure out exactly how many legitimate leads the property is getting from each marketing source. If they don’t have the technical capabilities to do this, it would be well worth the investment to employ companies that legitimize and process leads being such as Lead Tracking Solutions, Lead2Lease, or call centers like Level One that create guest cards around legitimate leads as upwards of 50% of what marketing sources call leads are not in fact leads at all. Or, you can ask your marketing source to review and separate all legitimate leads and only charge for those. Of course, there’s only one company I can think of that does that (RentWiki.com…shameless plug, I know).

Once you do the math, if you’re paying more than $50/lead, drop the source.
If you’re paying between $30-$50/lead, you’re still paying too much in this economy.
If you’re paying $10-$30/lead, that’s not too bad and acceptable.
If you’re paying $10 or less/lead, you’ve struck gold.

“But the good thing about pay/lease models is you don’t pay unless one of those leads turns into a lease, even if it was our leasing agent that closed the deal, right?” That is a true statement. But how much are you paying for that lease? This brings me to item #2:

2) Figure out how many of those leads turned into a lease. Again, if you don’t have the technical capabilities, refer to the some of the companies I mentioned above. The latest data I have reviewed with management companies and third party vendors shows most companies are paying anywhere between $300 to $1000/lease. Some marketing sources are approaching the $2000/lease mostly because they are so expensive to begin with. Anything less than a $300 cost/lease is a good in this economy and $150 or below is outstanding.

The bottom line: Only you, the leasing agent or property manager can drive a lease. Everyone else is simply a lead generator and the big question is…how much are you paying for the good leads?

In 2008 I traveled the country visiting with and talking to many executives in the Multifamily Industry. Usually the topic is…no surprise here…our socially integrated apartment search site RentWiki.com.  I begin to explain how renters can search for apartments and learn about the neighborhoods they’re considering moving into based on other renters’ posts and contributed writings. Then, I inevitably get asked the following question: “So, why in the world would someone post reviews or any information for that matter to a rental search site about their neighborhood?”  We’ll come back to that.

 Last year my son was playing in his first out-of-state baseball tournament on his travel team. We were heading to Myrtle Beach, SC, land of a million golf courses, all you can eat crab leg and seafood buffets and trinket shops on every corner. We were trying to determine where to stay, what fun things to do while we were there, what house we could rent with some friends and it what area, etc. So, I went to one of my favorite websites for just this sort of research: TripAdvisor.com.

 If you’ve never been on the site, you can search pretty much any town in any country and learn about the lodging, fun things to do, where to stay away from and what restaurant has the best borscht…and I don’t even know what that is.  I use the site whenever I want advice on, well, a trip. I’d rather hear about someone else’s really bad experience with the fishing charter company who’s boat was flooding captained by a drunk guy than have to experience it myself…with my wife and kids. I also like to hear recommendations and ideas on what could be really memorable experience.

 The trip came, they won a few games, lost a few and the rest of the vacation week was a blast. Several days after we got back home, I made it a point to recap our experiences on TripAdvisor, post a few photos and do a few reviews.  Why?  Because I benefitted from others , the time they spent reviewing and writing so that others could benefit from their experiences.

Now we come full circle. Why in the world would someone post reviews about their neighborhood? That is the very nature of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and social media. It’s a community of people willing to share with others for the betterment of community. Consider that people are very passionate about where they live and it suddenly becomes clear why renters would be willing to contribute to a site like RentWiki.  

 What’s interesting to note is that between July 2006 and July 2007, TripAdvisor grew from 5 million reviews to 10 million reviews.  All this in one year’s time and this was a year and a half ago. To date, RentWiki.com has received thousands of contributions about neighborhoods with many more being added every day.

 “What goes around, comes around.” “Do unto others.” “Good goes around.” “You sleep in the bed you make.” These are  old sayings for a reason, and like me, renters want to pay it forward on the Internet, too.