Internet

Internet

• Apartment Residents on the Move for Better Deals

  Rewards programs, customer service improvements remain popular as multifamily operators and property managers strive to keep heads on beds.

   

• Multifamily Operators Grapple with Lead-To-Lease Tracking

  Increased concerns regarding ILS pricing models and reporting methodologies is top of mind among apartment owners and property managers.

   

• ILS Pricing and Reporting Models Questioned

  Multifamily operators and property managers continue to grapple with lead-to-lease tracking accompanying the explosion in Internet marketing of apartment communities.

   

• Apartment Firms Push More Tech Projects to Vendors

  Both time and money are at a premium today, given reduced budgets and lean staffs. As a result, firms have less appetite to build product in-house and are increasingly reaching out to third-party providers for tech apps they might have previously handled in-house before the recession.

   

• Apartment Complexes Struggle to Fill Units

  Aug. 27--At least three of the new applicants at Phillips Landing Apartment Homes told Leasing Agent Jennifer Bricefield that Santa Claus brought them in.

   

• Multifamily Mobile Apps Continue to Proliferate

  If you think mobile-based computing and its various applications (apps) and wireless application protocol (WAP) Web sites are the wave of the future, get ready to get wet: The wave has crashed onshore, and the number of multifamily real estate investment trusts (REITs), Internet listing services (ILSs), and property management firms diving into the mobile market is increasing daily.

   

• Networkers' Super Data Pipelines Ease Bandwidth Demand

  From Facebooking Gen Yers to aging-in-place Boomers who want to video chat with their grandchildren, the broadband hunger among residents seems insatiable. Whether existing infrastructure is sizable enough to handle the data stream is up for debate, but fiber-optic network installers, including Cary, N.C.-based Connexion Technologies, are eager to get their systems—which they promise will ease the exaflood crisis—into multifamily buildings across the country.

   

• Ultimate ILS Aggregator: Too Good to Be True?

  A Google for the apartment industry? Perhaps, though maybe not as ubiquitous. From the same team at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications that brought us things such as Telnet, Mosaic, and Netscape comes Cazoodle.com, a crawler-bot-empowered Web site that pulls apartment listings from virtually every ILS out there and displays them in one simple interface.

   

• Contests Fuel Adoption of Multifamily Online Services

  For multifamily operators looking to power up adoption of technology or searching for broader, more exciting exposure to renters searching for apartments online, recent industry successes suggest that contests and promotions point the way towards greater participation in programs and initiatives among the public and property staffers alike.

   

• Let’s Be Friends: Multifamily Embraces Social Media

  It’s official: Social networking is the new multifamily must-have. Though high on buzz factor, social media has long been criticized within multifamily for an apparent lack of monetization opportunities. Those tides are turning as various multifamily firms begin to recoup marketing and advertising dollars from their online efforts.