What Would Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark Do If He Were in the Apartment Business?

I love long relaxing weekends, as it allows me to detach and really think about things. It is also a great time to read and catch up on RSS Feeds. Lately, I have been reading a lot about Tim Ferris, and his book The Four Hour Work Week.

Tim has an interesting blog post from last week Start-up Strategy: To Change the Game, Change the Economics of How It’s Played which includes an interview he did with Alan M. Webber co-founder of Fast Company magazine and former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review. Apparently Alan developed a very interesting habit more than 20 years ago, when he began to carry a supply of 3 x 5 index cards wherever life took him. He wrote down and collected the lessons and insights he gleaned from his experiences traveling the world and in his interactions with people ranging from CEOs and spiritual leaders to basketball coaches, novelists, and stars from dozens of other worlds…

Alan goes on to say;

“The game today is all about changing the game. Competing head-to-head on products and services is table stakes. Innovators are looking for a new business model that will destabilize their rivals and produce a breakthrough opportunity. In fact, in a recent survey of top-level executives in established companies IBM found that the biggest shared concern is that somewhere in the world—in a garage or a dorm room— someone is coming up with a new business model that will overthrow their established way of doing business.

What would Craigslist founder Craig Newmark do to our beloved Apartment Rental Business?
What would happen if what we typically charge for, say rent, were Free? Free, as the saying goes, is a pretty good price. What if we did what King Gillette did and give away the razor? What would we charge for?

There are a lot of ways to reinvent an economic model. But most established companies are unwilling to do it because it would mean destabilizing their own operation. The Trail Blazers, those who really turned the model inside out changed forever the way business is done on their given fields.

What can we do in the apartment business that creates a model that will Overthrow the Established Way of Doing Business.

Catch Some RATINGS AND REVIEWS FISH! Urbane Lab Project #052009

Aren’t the Rating and Review Sites such as Yelp and Get Satisfaction just a form of an old fashioned Recommendation Letter? Remember Recommendation Letters? Sales folks would salivate over getting one about their company, and proudly display them for all to see somewhere in their store, or in a binder for folks to peruse. Why, because people like reading what other people have to say about you. This is not a newfangled idea.

SNAIL MAIL IS NO MORE
While the idea of Recommendation Letters may somewhat still exist, none of us get much Snail Mail anymore. The handwritten note takes too much time, and a letter, who does that when you can zip off an email much faster. We all certainly still get a few handwritten notes and letters, but not so much. So, if folks aren’t sending letters or notes much anymore, how do we get those ever so valuable Recommendation Letters?

We have been working hard to point our residents toward our Urbane Yelp page, Urbane Get Satisfaction page and Apartment ratings page. However, folks sometimes just don’t have the time, so now what?

AGGREGATE and CONSOLIDATE
Ironically, as I was drafting this post, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing who has been called the World's Most Practical Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies, just posted Bring the Conversation to Any Web Page. What John is suggesting is exactly what Mike Whaling from @30Lines, also an Urbane Lab Technician, crafted for Urbane Apartments, a ratings and Review page, aptly named Urbane Talk.


FISH WHERE THE FISH ARE
We have used this metaphor before, and it is just on target, You should be hanging out where your customers are, where your Residents and Prospects are hanging out. But what about when they are in different places? We have actually added a page to our web site to highlight ratings and reviews and conversations about us labeled Urbane Reviews.

It is really just another blog site that our main web site points to. That enables our residents/customers to thread a conversation there via comments. We have set up RSS Feeds to automatically aggregate reviews from our Urbane Yelp page, Urbane Get Satisfaction Page and Urbane Apartment Ratings page directly t the site, with link backs to check authenticity.

The real value though, is just what John points out, Fishing Where the Fish Are. A lot of conversation about our Brand takes place on our Urbane facebook page, and we have started to aggregate those over to this Rating Page too.

We just launched this recently, so we are working out the bugs, but the point is, it becomes our show place for everything that folks are saying about us, good and bad.
Not all reviews and comments can be good, and I think the manor in which a company responds and participates in the conversation is also valuable to your prospects decision to choose your company

WHERE ARE YOU IN GOOGLE LAND Urbane Lab Project #051609

Sage Lewis, a Video blogger over at Search Engine Guide who keeps us up to date with what's hot in the world of search marketing and social media reports a story from MarketingVOX: The Voice of Online Marketing “Will anyone be able to stop the Google machine? They just continue to expand market share, as reported at Google accounted for 72.74% of all US searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 25, 2009, according to search-engine share data from Hitwise (via MarketingCharts).


WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD
Yikes, Conceivably almost 73% of online users are starting their search for YOU and YOUR Apartment Community on Google. Shouldn’t your first question be, Where does My Apartment Community or My Brand Show Up on Google? Do you even know? The good news is, it is pretty darned easy to figure out, and you don’t need your marketing director, your marketing agency or studio to give you some convoluted report, just Google "Apartments (Your City)" It is just that simple. You either place somewhere on Page One Google Search or you don’t, which is Where the Rubber Meets the Road.


STOP ACCEPTING EXCUSES
I preface this first with, there are clearly some great Marketing Studios and PR Firms, and they can add significant value. However, I for one have never really been able to separate out the BS when talking with marketing folks. For goodness sakes the best our industry can tell us as to where our traffic is coming from is only at best less than 35% accurate! Business folks have said forever, I know that 50% of my marketing is working; I just don’t know which half. Well, your form of measure has never been easier, just Google "Apartments (Your City)", or measure your Brand Awareness, Google your company name. If you don’t show up on page one, number one through five or six, you have work to do. If you Google your Brand or Company Name, and you do not DOMINATE the first few pages, Ah, You don’t have a Brand, at least not one that anyone recognizes. If your staff, your marketing agency or your PR Firm gives you guff about why you aren’t on page one in a Google Search, might want to tell them to Stop Making Excuses and Deliver Results.


LETS HAND IT OFF TO THE ILS (Internet Listing Services)
An integrated approach to your marketing campaign is clearly the best approach. We have bucked that trend, to our demise, only to prove a point that we got our boutique apartment management company, Urbane Apartments to page one, number one on a Google Search for Apartments Royal Oak absent any paid advertising, no paid print ads and no paid internet ads. We did this only to show the power of creating Resident Evangelists. Again, I have nothing against the ILS Services, but they are marketing for you and every other of your competitors. Don’t you find that a bit unsettling? Why not come up high on a Google Search, and get the direct click to your web site from the prospect. So if you’re internal and or external marketing folks are “Handing It Off to the ILS”, you may want to ask some questions as to why, and what else you may want to be doing. That isn’t marketing. No one cares about your Brand like you do.


SHOULD YOU NEED HELP
Should you need some help, give us a ring. We are apartment folks first, and apartment marketers second. And here’s the deal, don’t believe me, just Google Urbane Apartments, we dominate the first six or eight pages, I can’t make that up, its called a result. Google Apartments Royal Oak, We come up page one, number one to three consistently. Heck, just Google “Apartments” we come up on page five, AHEAD of every other apartment firm out there. Doesn’t that mean something? Maybe we have an idea or two that would help propel your apartment marketing campaign. And here’s the deal, being a boot strapped start up, I would bank on the idea, we can get you where you need to be for a heck of a lot less too, with significantly enhanced results, assuming your form of measurement are results.

IF MOM CAN’T NAVIGATE IT, NEITHER CAN YOUR PROSPECT

Happy Mothers Day to all of the property management mothers out there! I hope you have a grand day.

My friend Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand, has a thought provoking post about web sites, Showing All The Right People All The Wrong Things.

The premise is this, Have you clearly defined want you want your prospects to do once they visit your web site? ASK MOM, IF SHE CAN’T NAVIGATE IT, NEITHER CAN YOUR PROSPECT When is the last time YOU visited you own web site?

THE MOM TEST
I thought that Jennifer’s advice was great and an absolute excellent recommendation;

“In the world of small business where staffs are small and budgets are tight, shelling out for a usability analysis isn't always (ok, is almost never) feasible. Heck, many small businesses are already digging spare change from the couch in the lounge just to pay their hosting bills. That's why it's important to remember the single most cost-effective usability tool you have in situations like this: your mother.

Don't have a mother? That's fine, get the mother of one of your employees. Get the mother of your SEO (but not mine, she's so web savvy she runs backlink checks), or the mother of your accountant. Any mom will do, though it's best if she's over the age of 50.

Then sit her down at your site and ask her to do whatever it is you want someone to do. That might be sign up for a newsletter, it might be purchase a product or it might be download a white paper. Just start her off on the site with no instructions other than "do this." Then watch.

If she can't quickly and easily find her way to what it is you want her to do, chances are good you've got some usability problems. If you're standing behind her wanting to yell "it's right THERE!!!" while she leans forward and stares at the screen, you've definitely got usability problems”

Thanks Jennifer for some great and practical advise, that will certainly help some of our multifamily apartment friends!

ALL CRAIG'S LIST ADS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL Urbane Lab Project #050909

Are you a Craig’s List Advertiser? We are, and we LOVE Craig’s List! When executed well Craig’s List can drive a pile of traffic to your communities, but know, ALL CRAIG'S LIST ADS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL. Know that we DO NOT Love Craig’s List because it is FREE, that helps, but it isn’t the reason. We like to fish where the fish are, and we like catching fish, lots of fish. And to catch lots of fish, you likely have a lot of different lures in your tackle box. We recommend you have a few different Craig’s List Ads in your Marketing Arsenal too.

ITS NOT WHAT YOU SAY, BUT HOW YOU SAY IT
Industry-marketing leader Lisa Trosien posted recently about copy. Lisa has some excellent points.

What is the right copy length and content that will garner the short and brief attention of your prospect? You only have a snap flash to get your audience attention. Are you aware of what Craig’s Lists ads work and which ones don’t? And, assuming you get the prospects attention, will they click through to your web site? Heck, have you even thought through what you want them to do after they click on your ad? Perhaps that is an eminent place to start.

MAP IT OUT
As Jon Morrow, Associate Editor of Copyblogger so well out it in a recent post titled Your Blog vs. The World:7 Steps To Winning The War for Attention,

“When going into battle, a smart general doesn’t take a gun. He brings a map. Yes, guns and soldiers and tactics are important, but knowledge of the battlefield is a prerequisite to positioning all of those guns and soldiers and tactics appropriately. Whoever best masters the geography has an enormous advantage over their opponent. My advice: play to win”

Start by mapping out what you want your prospect to do once they do click your ad. For us, we want to get the prospect to our web site in the slightest amount of clicks. Our marketing goal with all our Craig’s List Ads are to get the prospect to fill out a Guest Card on our web site, in the straightest line possible, not the fastest, the straightest, there is a significant difference. As with romance, rushing through is not favorable. Nor is flying over your marketing ads, but grasping the prospects attention is a must.

NO CARES ABOUT YOUR APARTMENTS BUT YOU
Stop yapping about your product features, no one cares. People care about themselves, and they want to feel good. Try out snappy, short titles that evoke emotion. Try interesting, short paragraphs about fun times, sell short stories. They are far more interesting than your apartment features, which are most likely the same as the folks across the street.


STAY OUT OF THE RUTS
We regularly, but now sparingly use formatted programs like vFlyer. They are great, colorful and peppy, but……………, like all good things can become boring and complacent to your prospects. We got on the vFlyer kick last summer and fell into a bit of a rut and couldn’t figure out why. We started a combination different ads and quickly rebound our Craig’s List traffic. To that point though, a regular stream of vFlyer ads are great, and they populate many other sites, but similar to cocktails, just don't over do it.

Mix it up, teach yourself how to use basic HTML, it isn’t all that hard, and you should know it anyway. You can then get pretty creative and fun with your ads. And then too, just some simple short ads with pictures are always a great hit. EVERY ad should have pictures.


IT’S NOT FREE, BUT ALMOST
I hear the argument that Craig’s List isn’t really free, and it isn’t, someone has to post regularly. And you can’t post the same ad everyday either, nor should you, that’s just boring. We have developed a stable of Craig’s List Ad’s that we mix and match. For our boutique property management business, we post five to seven Craig’s List Ad’s every day, six days a week, which takes about forty five to fifty minutes each day. It just isn’t as big of a deal as some folks want to make it. We drive over three hundred pieces of traffic a month, which seems to keep our portfolio buoyant.

Happy Ad Writing! Should you need help or direction, give us a ring, we would be happy to assist!

WHAT GUS IS TEACHING ME ABOUT MARKETING APARTMENTS

This storyline isn’t new. A friend, Brian Owen who is also in the apartment business just blogged about Bass Fishing and Leasing Apartments. As you can tell Gus is a dog, a mostly wonderful Bull Terrier. Gus is a year and a half old and is my first dog of my own. Gus goes to the office when he feels like it, and has learned to regularly tweet on his own twitter account @Gus_Urbane. He has created quite a stir from time to time and he has his own Mac Book. His leasing ratios are better than most other canine.

ENGAGE AND EMOTION
We have all heard about the Four P’s of Marketing, but what about the new two E’s, Emotion and Engagement, are you fully utilizing them? Gus, like most pets really knows how to evoke our emotions. In our small business, a boutique property management business, we decided to go after the pet market, and accept pets. Lots of places accept pets, but with weight and breed restrictions, and a hefty pet deposit. We decided to keep it simple; We Love Pets at Urbane, no fees and no breed restrictions. The theory was this, If we have a good resident, they likely have a good pet. If we have a bad resident, they likely have a bad pet. We worked really hard on an enhanced resident screening system and attracting great residents, which has also improved collections. A nice side benefit to accepting pets!

But the success of this program isn’t about accepting pets, It is about “Urbane Loves Pets” which has successfully evoked prospects and residents emotion. Consequently, we own the local pet market. If you are going after sliver markets, go with vengeance and own them.


MAKE IT A PLAYFUL EXPERIENCE


Gus is a pretty happy guy, tail always wagging. He just wants to play, play and play. He is Fun Boy. With that, we have lightened up the entire leasing process. Apartment hunting is not a walk in the park. We have a Centralized Leasing Center, known as Urbane Underground that is anything but typical. There are farm watering troughs with tropical plants in them. A forty-five foot long bamboo planter. Crazy music playing. A Tropical bird hanging out. A conference table that hangs from the ceiling with no legs. Anything but typical. Point is, it is very whimsical and fun. Before the prospect leaves, we do shots! No one cares about your apartments, they care about them and their lifestyle. You are selling lifestyle.


EVERYONE LOVES TREATS



Anyone who has pets know they love treats. Gus is no different, he lives for treats. We have developed a pretty interesting program and have created Urbane VIP cards. They resemble a credit card and enable the holder to take advantage of several discounts locally with participating Urbane VIP Vendors, each marked with a like sticker on their door or window . During the tour, we go through the program, explain the benefits and send them off with an Urbane VIP Card. I am pretty sure our competitors aren’t forking over any treats. It is a great way to differentiate, and is funded by the local commerce.


MAKE ME LAUGH
Gus loves to make me laugh, and he does a great job of that. Our marketing at Urbane is anything but typical or traditional. We set up movies that reverse play against a backdrop that show silhouettes of girls dancing together, guys dancing together and a variety of other wacky stuff. We can set up the movie in minutes, and it comes on at dark and shuts off at 2;00 AM. Cars and people literally stop in the street and stare. They laugh, and make lots of comments about Urbane, including some who think that two guys dancing together is too provocative. We like that. Is your marketing material causing your prospects to talk about you, or does it end up in the trash because it is outdated old and stale? BTW, the movie we made cost us nothing to make, the projector is reused over and over.

LETS CONNECT
Perhaps the most significant thing I have learned from Gus is that he loves top connect with people, and so do your residents and prospects. Our blog, the UrbaneBlog.com and the UrbaneLobby.com has caused lots of folks to connect with hip and cool local business, blathering and goings on and just a general give back to the community. But how can you do those kind of things one may ask, what is the pay back. Try this on, page one Google, number one ranking for apartments Royal Oak, one of the most used search’s. Where does your community fare with a Google Ranking. Even more, what kind of web traffic does your community drive? We will have over 14,0000 visitors this month. We only have 360 units. I think the blog is a great payoff don’t you?

You too can try these things. They aren’t hard, and they are not expensive. This is a dog eat dog world, you need to Break from the Pack of Apartment Commodity.

If you need some help, drop us a line, we would love to implement some radical ideas into your marketing program and help you achieve better occupancy and better retention.

We have lots more to report on too, as we are turbo charging our blog with local search capabilities, and we have added advertisement revenue. More to follow, make it a Great Week, and rent lots of apartments!

The Urbane Story

Just wanted to give a huge thank you to Mike Whaling and 30Lines for presenting our Urbane Apartments story at the AIM Conference this year. Mike has also been instrumental at helping us transform the leasing paradigm and always figures out a way to implement our crazy and wacky marketing ideas. We are working hard to Break From the Pack of Apartment Commodity by Enhancing the Leasing Experience!

Here are the numbers, what are yours?
-) Average Rent per Square Foot; $2.45 to $2.75 Note that the comps are at $.75 to .$95 per S/F
-) Our leasing labor is $110 per unit leased.
-) Our total marketing costs, including 30Lines retainer is $130 per unit per year.
-) Our occupancy for the stabilized portfolio is 98% with year over year average at 96%
-) Our Retention is 65%, with the average stay of 2.5 years
-) We have 15 community's scattered around Royal oak, MI
-) Total unit count, 360 units
-) Web Site visitors per month, 14,000 and growing at 35% month over month

Urbane Apartments Case Study - AIM 2009

View more presentations from Mike Whaling.

DITCH TRADITIONAL MARKETING AND GO IT ALONE Urbane Lab Project #050209

STOP BABYING AROUND
Things have changed, right? But don’t we hear that all the time? Perhaps a better question to that statement is; have you changed with the times? Are you willing to change the way you are marketing apartments?

Folks want to refer to themselves as “change artists” or “change agents”, but are those just popular buzz words to make it appear you are ahead of the pack.
I am met an old marketing friend for coffee last week. Not all that significant I suppose, except he fired me as a client several years ago. Our relationship continued for a while after the firing, but was never quite the same. Perhaps it was because we moved on and figured out how to build a Brand, Solo, We went it Alone absent another marketing agency.


IN HOUSE HAS ADVANTAGES
Now to be clear, I have nothing against marketing agencies and studios. They can serve a purpose, and can provide value. One thing my friend pointed out in our conversation was that today, their marketing studio competition is no longer other marketing studios, it is the freelance creative sitting at Peneria

It made me further think about how we are doing things. Today, anyone with photo shop can mostly be a graphic designer. Assuming you have the various files required, it is a matter of cut and paste. What used to cost $750 for floor plan collateral brochures can now be produced In House and emailed to Kinko’s for printing for a total cost of $39.

THE STAGE IS LARGER
Need a new logo? Need to add some freshness to your collateral material? You can really compound your efforts if you find that creative free lance resident. When you “look within” the chances of creating resident evangelist increases exponentially. Or toss it out to a larger stage at one of the dozens of open source web sites where you set the price you will pay, and graphic designers from all over the world send you submissions. You can even set up a voting mechanism.

When we started our business we paid $5,000 for our logo to be designed, and I thought it was really cool. A couple of years ago, a resident asked me if he could submit a new logo design for Urbane Apartments that more aligned to what the Brand really was. Note that the resident know more about the Brand than we did. Remember, your Brand isn't what you think it is, it is what your Resident thinks it is. What they designed for us with the the blue background city scrape and new logo design he came up with blew me away. So did the price, $250 total, a nice benefit of being fired.

BUT WHAT ABOUT PR
Perhaps the best piece of the new change is the ease of distributing the message. Every company wants to get published, or you should. It really helps juice your Brand, and helps your Google Rankings. Start Blogging and start doing some of your own Press Releases. Start to create your own Long Tail. I encourage you to start today, you cannot buy a block of Long Tail from the local marketing store. It must be built over time. But when you do take the time to carefully execute a strategy, folks start talking about you, one story at a time, as they did with us at Business Week Magazine, Builder Magazine or Multifamily Executive.

Need some help laying out your Social Media Marketing Plan? Give us a ring. We have already done it, and can save you time and a whole bunch of dough. You need to start your Long Tail now,