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This morning the following headline jumped out at me -  For Generation Y, American Dream Becomes an Apartment in the City. Since I am both Gen Y and an apartment dweller I was curious to see what reasoning there is for apartments to be the "American Dream".

Here's a brief portion of the article, originally published in Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee:

Generation Y, roughly characterized as those individuals born between 1980 and 2000, are showing different habits than their parents when it comes to homeownership and where they want to live. John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow with the Urban Land Institute, says Gen Y will be renting "far longer than past generations," especially since they have witnessed the mortgage meltdown. Many other considerations factor into this ongoing trend, such as economic restrictions like high unemployment and debt from college loans. Many people in this age range simply don't have the resources to get started on homeownership right away, so rentals and apartment sharing will be common in the short and medium term until they look to buy homes and settle down. "It's only a good investment if it fits in that lifestyle you're leading at that time," says 26-year-old Milwaukee renter Clarissa Mankus. "I'm not ready to sacrifice certain things, like travel and graduate school." However, many people just prefer the urban lifestyle to owning a house in the suburbs. As a group, twentysomethings and recent college graduates anticipate higher job turnover and getting married later than their parents, so they like to have flexible living arrangements in lively, urban areas.

I'd say that flexibility and lack of long term commitment are huge driving forces in this trend with my generation. I also think the convenience of apartment life speaks to our "instant gratification" generation. While, I hate stereotyping Gen Y I will say that I love that if something breaks all I have to do is submit a work order online, and (in most cases) I'll return home to the problem solved. If only I had that option with my car. I choose to live in an apartment because I can walk to food, I live 1 mile from my job, and living in Texas a pool is a must for the summer (but who wants to upkeep a pool?!). I love feeling like where I live is my choice. I'm spontaneous, just the mere idea of trying to think of where I'd want to live in 10 years is still a bit too odd for me. So, as a Gen Y, I don't live in an apartment because I "have" to, I love apartment life and I choose it!

I'm not sure how it happened but somehow it's March 1st. At the beginning of each month to get my creative juices flowing I have two random/fun traditions.

1) I change my desktop wallpaper. There are numerous resources for finding new and creative desktops but I'm partial to Smashing Magazine's monthly calendar desktops. Each month various designers submit their artwork/photography with an incorporated calendar for that month. Here is March's edition.

My current background:

2) My second random tradition is to print off a list of this month's fun/off-the-wall holidays. You may have seen various people posting on Facebook or Twitter "hey have you heard today is National Donut Day?". I love these silly holidays, so I like to have them all in one place. I think the extremely random holidays make for good social media content, or resident event planning, or just a fun conversation piece.

Here are some of the holiday's I have highlighted for March:

2: Namesake Day - perhaps your resident's would like to know how your property got it's name.
3: I Want You to Be Happy Day
4: Courageous Follower Day
8: International Working Women's Day - would be a perfect day to do a blog post about the women on your onsite team
9: Organize Your Home Office Day - this would be a great day to pull some resources to share on organizing small spaces
10: International Day of Awesomeness
13: Good Samaritan Involvement Day - why not organize a meetup for your residents to carpool to a near by non-profit to volunteer for a few hours on this Saturday
15: Napping Day: aka the Monday after daylight savings
18: Companies that Care Day - do your residents know what you're doing as a company to give back?
21: Memory Day - if you have a Facebook fan page, I think this would be a great day to ask your residents to post their favorite memories of living in your apartment or even post photos of these memories.
25: Letting Go of Stuff Day - many non-profits are happy to come pick up donations. This would be a great time to have your residents collect all their unused items to donate to a charity.
26: Make Up Your Own Holiday Day - what if a holiday was named after your community? What would the theme of your holiday be?
27: Education and Sharing Day

You might get a few ideas reading over the entire list of March holidays. I have printable calendar version pinned up on my cubicle wall.

Do you have any "beginning of the month" traditions?

We had record breaking snowfall in the DFW area yesterday. When I returned home from work yesterday (early) there were several snowmen in various locations around my apartment community. My Facebook stream was filled with pictures of my local friends playing in the snow and building their very own snowpeople. One local apartment, Tower Village, jumped in on a perfect opportunity to utilize social media for what it's intended for - being social.

Tower Village Apartments posted photos today on their fan page of snow men/women around their community and are asking for votes on the best.

I vote this one:

There is a weekly apartment industry chat on twitter (#aptchat) hosted by Lisa Trosien and Mike Whaling. Last week's topic was about apartments and blogging. Surprisingly enough there was not much discrepancy as to whether or not apartments should have a blog, there was almost a full agreement that all apartments should start blogging. There was however, quite a discussion about what types of topics apartment might blog about. Since I've been blogging for over 3 years and I've lived in many apartments I can think of a multitude of possible blog topics - but I'd say the easiest is always decorating. Since there are already numerous design and decorating blogs, finding resources should be simple.

A post from one of my favorite blogs, How about orange, is a great example of a possible apartment blog topic. The post Big list of DIY wall art ideas - is a perfect set of resources for people, like me, who live in an apartment but like to change things around fairly regularly.

Here are some of my favs:

CD-case Wall Art:

Vintage Looking Dominos

Embroidery hoops framing fabric

Painted Thrift Store Frames

Paper-silhouette art

Patterned Wall Squares

I'm not sure how practical this is, but I love this DIY (do-it-yourself) Faux Fireplace from Apartment Therapy! Granted, I actually have a real fireplace in my apartment, but that's beside the point.

Have you tried it?

Yet another Facebook redesign is being rolled out to the site's 400+ million users.

A Facebook press release explained:

New Home Page Design
A simplified home page to provide easier access to what you're looking for on Facebook. You can now quickly navigate to commonly-used areas of the site from the top and left hand menus. From the Top Menu, you can now easily find new messages, requests, and notifications using the icons in the top, left hand corner. The left hand menu is now where you can find all of your applications, previously located in the bottom dock. The links on the left will take you to your application dashboards. You can also find your Messages and Facebook Chat from the left hand menu.

Here are some of the features of the new design, directly from the Facebook website:

I think it's great that they released an official guide to the home page

I've already seen numerous complaints that as soon as we've figured out where things are Facebook changes things again. I think these changes were necessary. As more and more apps are introduced into the Facebook stream I'm glad there is an easy separation. I wonder if there will be any changes for Fan Pages? What do you think of the new design?

I may get rocks thrown at me for saying this, but I did not watch even 1 minute of the Superbowl last night. I did however, check in on twitter occasionally to see what people were saying about the ads.

The Google ad seemed to be the most popular on twitter. Did you see it?

What would you say was the can't miss ad from Superbowl 44?

We can file this under: resources worth passing on to residents / resources worth "borrowing" and reworking for your property

Apartment Therapy has a two-part, seven-points-each checklist on steps residents should take before the moving moving day. While I'm probably the expert by now I'm not a huge fan of moving. On moving day one might see me walk in a few cirles, lose my keys at least 3 times and forget where I put my cell phone at least once. I am certainly not thinking about the cleanliness of the fridge. Fortunately for me, I do have a few friends who think about such details. For your residents who may not have the priviledge of having my friends, or maybe those who just like checklists, I recommend you passing along these two resources.

Renters: 7 Things to Do Before Moving Out
7 Things To Do Before You Move In [Apartment Therapy]

I love random holidays. Not in a need to wear shamrock earrings kind of way, but in a "oh hey it's groundhog day". I am also as my mother calls me "a high information sort". I love to know random facts about why holidays were started or who named them. My friends forward me emails about such random facts pretty regularly.

Relate 24/7 (the featured product of the month) has a holiday campaign feature that allows apartments to send their residents Select messages via email on particular holidays. Each message that goes out is customized with the property's name and is individually addressed to the residents. We are very anti "dear resident" around here. Today 25,851 apartment residents nationwide received the following friendly email from their leasing team:

Subject: Groundhog's Day from Your Team at ABC Apartments!

Hello Sally,

Will he or won't he?

Today is the day when Punxsutawney Phil, the only true weather forecasting groundhog, ventures out to predict the weather. If he sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter, and if he does not see his shadow, there will be an early spring.

Happy Groundhog's Day!

Sincerely,
Your Team at ABC Apartments

If you haven't heard Engagement is the buzz word for 2010. With all the Blackberries, iPhones and other various SmartPhones people are connected and it's nice to get a simple ping now and then to know I'm not just some person among the masses.

My challenge for you today, dear readers, is to watch this video and not laugh ...

In semi-related news our featured product of the month is Relate 24/7℠ a convenient, easy to use way for you to communicate with your residents. This multifamily specific email marketing machine will allow you to see exactly who has opened your resident emails. Which is, as we learned from the video above, a great alternative to having your resident's pets "delivering" your notes and flyers .

*Ok first, I must preface this post by saying it's almost 5:30, I've had too much coffee and I think everything is funny right now.

But really ... I read a post on MSN today, wait no MSNBC - that's a legit source right? Well I thought so, until I saw this article's headline Cold sheets? Hire a human 'bed-warmer'. A bed who?

LONDON - International hotel chain Holiday Inn is offering a trial human bed-warming service at three hotels in Britain this month. If requested, a willing staff-member at two of the chain's London hotels and one in the northern English city of Manchester will dress in an all-in-one fleece sleeper suit before slipping between the sheets. "The new Holiday Inn bed warmers service is a bit like having a giant hot water bottle in your bed," Holiday Inn spokeswoman Jane Bednall said in an e-mailed statement.

You really can't make this stuff up. I'd personally send a box of cookies to the first multifamily person to attempt to recommend that human bed-warmer be added to your list of resident benefits.

I'm really trying to see how someone might take this serious, but really I just can't.

Holiday Inn are promoting the service with the help of sleep-expert Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Center, who said the idea could help people sleep. "There's plenty of scientific evidence to show that sleep starts at the beginning of the night when body temperature starts to Drop," he said. "A warm bed — approximately 20 to 24 Celsius — is a good way to start this process whereas a cold bed would inhibit sleep."

We'll file this under: things you don't want to miss ...

Lifehacker, one of the top-linked blogs on the internet, posted a link to an Apartment Therapy article last week on What Questions Do You Ask Before Signing a New Lease.

With over 60 comments on the two posts combined, this is one of those blog posts that the ensuing conversation may be just as valuable as the post itself. I'd certainly recommend reading the comments to be prepared for the types of questions renters will ask before they make their final leasing decision. Some of the comments are about renting homes, but I'd say the majority work for multifamily apartment leases.

Here is a comment worth noting:

Check the hours of the office - I'll never live in apartments that are closed all weekend when many are now open 7 days a week or at least Saturday. Ask about 24 hour maintenance. Ask about parking. Find out if there is a courtesy officer to handle disputes if necessary.

Finally, coming full circle back to the internet, on which you are reading this... read reviews and ask around! When my fiance asked coworkers about various apartment complexes she got inside info on about 5 of them that were cause to immediately strike them off our list, and some of them we had almost settled on! Reviews and inside knowledge is the only way you'll find out about crime, poor management, poor maintenance, hidden fees, poor construction, etc.

One thing to note, are these types of commonly asked questions covered in your leasing training?

A little Friday fun for you ...

And here's the Perry Point gang in their snuggies. I think this is funny and certainly memorable.

Thursday of last week myself and our Training Coordinator, Jossi Wiser, armed with 3 iPods and 2 iPhones and of course 1 Turbo Volkswagen Beetle hit the road to Houston for a fun networking event put on by the Houston Apartment Association (HAA). This exclusive event was held at a Houston wine bar and was limited to only those of us under the age of 35.

Here is what the Facebook invite said:

Meet the Next Generation of HAA Leadership. NEW for 2010! Be there from the beginning. This new niche group within HAA is dedicated to the networking and professional development needs of HAA members 35 and younger. Network with your peers at this FREE event and grow your career together among the next generation of HAA leadership!

• Learn about how to get plugged in to the powerful HAA network
• Discover volunteer opportunities
• Meet young HAA members from across Houston just like you!
• Learn about professional development and career enhancement
• Door prizes and more!

Being that I'm very involved in the Gen Y community I jumped at an opportunity to meet fellow Multifamily youngsters. The venue was beautiful, even if it did take us over an hour in Houston traffic to find it. There may have been a blonde and blonder moment when the car was dinging at us but I can not confirm or deny these alleged accusations. Upon arriving I opted to choose the red wine with the weirdest names – which turned out pretty successful and I'm pretty sure Jossi was drinking sugar water masked as white wine.

I think overall the event was a hit. We met several Property Managers and onsite people in addition to a couple of guys who called themselves "Trash Men" (they were in waste management sales). This is the first I've heard of such a targeted meetup in the multifamily industry and I want to commend HAA for the great idea. We will definitely be going back, and of course Jossi and I would be happy to hop on an airplane to another city if this idea takes off!

This morning's article from Daily Finance starts off "another day, another new product from Google". As an iPhone user I'm pretty excited by all of the fast moving mobile additions Google, and many others, are making these days.

Google's new addition is pretty self explanatory:

"Near Me Now," a service that makes it fast and easy to learn about your immediate vicinity with a much simpler interface than other local search applications use.

And since pictures are worth a thousand words ... here is a screenshot:

This of course will create a push for Google local advertising. With so many location-based apps being thrown into the market place, my recommendation is that you make sure that your property is listed in all of the right places. A really quick way to do that is GetListed.org and of course you can go directly to Google Local to add/edit your listing.

Also, if you have a blog or a resident portal/bulletin board this may be a fun resource for new (or existing) residents to find places local to your community!

You might work in the multifamily industry if you laugh at a floorplan page! The following is a simple (yet quite comical) typo that is a great example of why all of our sites go through Quality Assurance (QA) before they go live.

I believe, the thing I love most about having the pleasure of being on the marketing side of the multi-family industry are the endless opportunities to try something different. Almost daily, I find inspiration from some fun marketing effort by a restaurant, doctor's office, shoe store, you name it, that can easily be applied to apartment marketing or management company branding or even Ellipse to client engagements.

Being that I have a background in design, I'm easily inspired by fun looking marketing material. I also, have quite an affinity for han drawn/doodled works. When I returned from lunch today to an email from GasPedal (highly recommend you subscribe) about a FREE Word of Mouth Comic Book I was pretty excited! 25 pages of word of mouth marketing tips, doodles and sketches!

While you can most certainly read the full 25 pages, here are some of my favorite word of mouth marketing tips:

Marketing is what you do, NOT what you say

Angry customers will spread word of mouth on their own.
Happy customers need more help sharing their thoughts.

It must be genuine: don't let it be a veneer of cool

What will have a conversation start? What is the trigger?
It must be truly genuine and real.
Don't let it be a veneer of cool.

Be Creative! Be Wacky!

Talkers aren't target markets or customers, they're just talkers.
Topics: be creative. Do something different!
Make it a memorable experience.
Push it to the wacky!

Go where your customers already are

Go where your customers already are.
Go where you can make a positive impact and be involved.

Start Listening

Get into your google search terms, RSS feeds - get a feel for what is being said about you online.

Don't forget: Have Fun!

Word of mouth should be fun and exciting!

Jason Falls of The Social Media Explorer shared the results of a great survey conducted by Business.com on the benefits of social media and business.

This might be the first quantified list of what social media can do for your business. It was taken from survey of over 1,400 individuals, 69 percent of whom work at business currently using social media and 59 percent of whom are business owners or C-Level executives.

If you run into someone who doubts what social media can do for business from now on, share this information with them.

The question asked was How does your company currently judge the success of social media initiatives? And the answers:

Have you seen similar results in your business?

On this Eve of Christmas Eve I'd like to share with you this lovely video entitled Merry Prankmas! Here's the back story from Chicago Now:

Trusting soul he, Louie left his keys with his friend Adal Rifai and his girlfriend, Molly Hall. One day, Adal mentioned that we (Louie's improv friends) should prank his apartment.

One of the first ideas was to fill it with balloons since Louie is terrified of balloons for some reason (actually, that's a pretty common fear, believe it or not.) But, with Brett Lyons, Adal decided to giftwrap Louie's entire apartment (Brett didn't do any wrapping though.)

Adal opened up Louie's apartment last Saturday and about a dozen improvisers Dropped by to help wrap up the apartment and everything inside it! Here's the video that Adal took of the finished product:

Dominos Pizza recently created a great video on how they utilized social media and costumer criticism to "Turnaround" and come back with a new and improved product. There are no shortage of venues for customers to make complaints these days. What's important to ask is how businesses are utilizing this customer feedback to improve.

You probably got the same email we did ... but in case you didn't! Save the date:

I personally use the Yelp augmented reality feature on my iPhone, when I'm traveling, to find nearby restaurants.

On Tuesday of this week Lisa Trosien held a webinar on Preparing Your 2010 Property Management Marketing Plan.

Here are the high points of the presentation (with my comments of course):

• Poll: 65% of the webinar attendees stated that they are only "Somewhat" prepared for marketing 2010, 10% said they are "Absolutely ready" and 10% said they are not ready.
• J.C. Hart has replaced their paper newsletter with a blog on their website.
• It's very important that you intergrate an interactive map into your website. Prospects and residents want to know what's near by.
• The number one amenity that residents are asking for now is allowing for pets. Does your website show that your property is pet friendly?
• Poll: Only 16% of those attending the webinar said they think they're doing everyting they can to maximize online and print advertisements.
• Ask your ILS' what amenitity is most popular in the area where your property is. In Chicago the #1 amenity is parking, while in Dallas the first choice is air conditioning.
• On average, including a coupon on your interting listings will increase leads by 18%.
• Remove "Call for Pricing": including specific prices on your listing will increase your leads by 30%.
• Be very specific with your description copy on your listings. ILSes are not the place for "fluffy" brochure type text.
• Emails: the most popular day of the week to send retail emails is Monday or Tuesday.
• Stock photo, lifestyle shots have a higher click through rate than property photos.
• GetListed.org: make sure you're listed on Google, Yahoo & Bing
• Idea that seems a little strange, but just might work: buy bottles of hand sanitizer - put a label on the bottle that says "Hand Sanitizer sponsored by ABC Apartments" -- deliver your bottles to banks, Drs, etc nearby. The goal is to create more local foot traffic.
• Idea I love: J.C. Hart will be starting soon doing video interviews of neighborhood businesses for their youtube channel.
• Thanks Lisa for plugging Relate 24/7 as great product for email marketing to prospects! Major advantage: having a program that monitors the open rates for you.

If you'd like to listen to the full hour long presentation you can do that here. Thanks Lisa for sharing these ideas.

If you've been following along with Ellipse adventures on our blogs or on Facebook you probably know that this is wine delivery season. With over 700 bottles of wine being sent via snail mail and hand carried we're already receiving several thank yous. Yesterday we received a fun thank you email that we thought was worth sharing.

We had someone (who wishes to remain anonymous) get a creative urge and send us the following poem:

(Preface: I hate Beware of Such and Such email forwards I get. As soon as I get one I check out its validity via my trusty friend Google, perhaps you've been acquainted. Ok, now that that's out of the way we can get on with this.)

My responsibilities here at Ellipse are pretty broad. Any phone call that come into the office directed towards "a marketing person," "the PR person," "whoever handles your marketing", "your tradeshow coordinator", you get the idea, comes to my desk. Today I received a call from Dana calling from NAA* asking for "the person who coordinates your tradeshows."

He was calling to let me know that there had been a few cancelations at The Headquarter hotel for the June NAA Conference in New Orleans. Since we were previous attendees it was a courtesy call to see if we'd like early booking rates at $50 per room/per night less than if we waited until closer to the time to book. He told me since we were exhibiting we'd probably want to have our rooms starting June 23rd (the night before the event) and "you're probably like everyone else who likes to do the tear down on the final day and head home." We discussed how many rooms we'd probably want - I told him we'd had 8 rooms at Brainstorming and I believed it was 6 at the previous NAA in Vegas. He asked me for names for each room letting me know I could change them as it got closer. He already knew our address and company name so I only hesitated for a quick moment when he asked "what card I'd like to hold these rooms on." I told him I'd need written confirmation and that an Executive here would need final approval. He said “that's fine, I'll fax you a credit card confirmation form right now and as soon we get that back we'll be good to go.”

In my search for an Executive I told Rory Ellis in Client Services why I was looking for someone. He pointed out that I gave a credit card number over the phone, how did I know they were who they said? Hmm, excuse me while I go stare at the fax machine and hope that the impending fax has a big, pretty NAA logo on it.

A few moments later I received the following email:

Please see attached invoice and credit card authorization form. If you have not already done so, please provide a full rooming list for each room. (1 name per room) along with the check-in/check-out dates for each person on your list. Please fax back the attached within 24 hours of receiving this e-mail to guarantee pricing and availability. If you have already faxed us the credit card authorization, we do require that you sign and date the attachment (booking agreement) and fax that back to us also.
We look forward to doing business with you.

Hello, Panic Mode.

Sounds legit, except it didn't come from NAA like the guy on the phone told me. The email was from Conventional Housing Online, so of course being that we design websites my first step was to check out the link in the signature. At which point I said to myself "oh sh*t, these people aren't for real, this website is horrible."

Next step, copy and paste URL and Google "conventionalhousingonline.com scam" and "'convention travel' scam". If you're ever wondering the legitimacy of anything/company/person just Google [name] and the word scam. Hey, there's even results for "banana scam."

My findings were scary to say the least; there are multiple complaints about multiple tradeshows:

Beware! These guys are totally shady. They called us last year and pretended to be part of the show we were going to. My assistant booked our entire exhibiting staff through them. When we showed up at the hotel we had no rooms and we had no recourse (we left several massages on their 866 #, but we never got a call back). We ended up out on the Interstate--an hour from the convention center. The show managers could not help us because they were not aware of this company at all.

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It has come to our attention that Convention Expo Travel is calling BCMC exhibitors informing them that they need to make their hotel reservations now as there is a limited supply available. This is inaccurate information. Convention Expo Travel is not identifying themselves when calling exhibitors and they are giving the impression that they are working with BCMC and the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Please note that Convention Expo Travel is NOT affiliated with BCMC or any of the convention hotels, especially the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The Crowne Plaza Hotel has confirmed they do not have rooms set aside for this company

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We would like to warn our attendees and exhibitors to NOT BOOK A HOTEL with a company called Convention Expo Travel. The company is in NO WAY AFFILIATED with the VHA Leadership Conference. Please do not give them your credit card information under any circumstances. Unfortunately, this kind of scam is not uncommon in the conference business. If you are booking a hotel room, we highly recommend that you book directly with the Grand Hyatt in San Antonio at (800) 648-4462. The Marriott Rivercenter is sold out on several of the conference nights.

We have already informed NAA (and our credit card company) about the situation. I was told the housing director would be handling the situation on their end. We also thought it was very important to post a warning since we are not sure how they have our contact info and how many other people will be receiving the same call I got.

What did I learn?

• Book your travel directly through the NAA Registration & Housing website.
• Ask for verification information before providing information to anyone over the phone.

What did I do?

• I faced reality
• I didn't try to handle it by myself
• I quickly found the root cause
• I canceled my credit card immediately
• I informed anyone else that may have the chance of running into this problem

Update: I spoke to Kerry at NAA this morning and she assured me NAA will be doing everything necessary to handle this and they appreciated us spreading the word.

Update 2.0: NAA sent out the following email today:

I learned an interesting statistic this morning, there are more than 18,000 redbox kiosks and new kiosks are currently being installed at a rate of one per hour! My first reaction was "wow, we're in the wrong business!". But, I am of the school of thought that there are lesson to learn from every business. The case study that I read, essentially concluded that no matter what product, or even service, we are offering - we need to give our customers (residents) less choices.

As product managers, we have somehow convinced ourselves that our customers both want and need more choices when it comes to our products. This thinking has allowed us to heap on more and more choices for our customers to make: colors, pricing plans, features, etc. However, it just may be the case that the one thing that our customers really don't want is to have to make more decisions in order to buy our products.

So, here's my question for you – how many choices do your prospects have in the decision making process? How many floorplans are there to chose from? How many pages on your website give choices other than lease an apartment with us?

One of our policies is that every website we build must provide access to decision making information (i.e. physical address, contact info, rental application, etc) with 3 clicks or less. From the home page of a website, a prospect should not have to click more than 3 pages "deep" to have vital information. We see far too many apartment websites that require home > floorplans > floorplan B > options > rent online. The more times someone has to click, the higher the chance they'll leave your site without making a decision.