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On-Line Expert Highlights Revenue Potential for Resident Portals, Identifies Web Site Pitfalls
Published: July 24, 2007
By Teresa O'Dea Hein
While a community Web site is an important amenity and tool for residents, it can also generate additional revenue, according to on-line pioneer Rob Remus, president of Property Centric, a 1 ½-year-old company based in Erdenheim, Pa., just outside Philadelphia. However, to be as effective as possible, designers of community Web site have to avoid several common pitfalls.
“Our Web sites are designed for the resident as a consumer. The more he or she uses the community Web site, the more it also benefits the property owner by producing ancillary revenue streams,” Remus explains. In keeping with that potential, Property Centric’s motto is “attract, retain, lead and profit.”
Instead of the national search focus of tools like Google and Yahoo, Remus says his company focuses on local searches for more relevant results, rather than just for national chain stores and restaurants, with a custom-built Internet search solution dedicated exclusively to serving the multifamily property management industry. “People care about getting what they want in one or two clicks,” Remus says. “This local search capacity adds a stickiness element to a property manager’s resident portal to enhance its effectiveness. Content is king and link-through is queen,” he points out.
With its technology, Property Centric was, for instance, able to move one large multifamily owner and manager up to the top three in Internet search engine results, enabling them to be far more visible to potential residents. Retaining those residents is then facilitated with the property’s enhanced Web site, which offers additional features such as a Resident’s Corner with local search capabilities, community e-newsletters, online concierge, service request form, e-map and referral program.
Mark-Taylor Residential, a leading apartment community developer and manager with more than 9,000 units throughout the greater Phoenix area, implemented Property Centric’s solution in 2006. According to Kim Atkinson, director of marketing and public relations for Mark-Taylor, “With Property Centric’s local search engine in place, repeat visits are on the rise and our site traffic and natural search rankings have improved drastically.
With over 7,000 multifamily residents at Mark-Taylor Residential conducting about 55,000 searches monthly, those searches help elevate the multifamily property owner via the Property Centric search engine and marketing services -- without an owner or manager having to pay for search engine optimization (SEO).
Ultimately, this creates a network, too, for the 38 percent of the nation that lives in apartments and is, Remus maintains, a group coveted by marketers.
By creating local content for the property manager’s community Web sites, Property Centric can drive more site traffic and bolster site usage. “This not only can generate stronger brand awareness, it can dramatically improve a SEO rankings in the major search engines. More users finding and clicking on their site leads to improved rankings of the property management firm’s or community’s Web site on major search engines such as Yahoo and Google,” Remus explains.
“For example, without any other search engine optimization efforts, the Property Centric search engine has helped www.Mark-Taylor.com consistently appear on page one of Google, Yahoo! and MSN for our most targeted keywords: ‘Phoenix luxury apartments,’” Atkinson reports. “Also, we can now be found on page two or three of natural search listings at the major search engines for more broad searches such as ‘Apartments Phoenix.’ Before the installment of Property Centric’s search engine, our site was typically found on page 10 of Google’s natural listings. Additionally, search volume to our local search engine has skyrocketed, bringing in on average, an additional 43,000 page views per month for the last quarter,” Atkinson adds.
An additional benefit is that Property Centric’s unique search solution allows for paid search placement and banner advertising by local and national advertisers that want to market their products and services to area residents via a community’s Web site. This provides a new and significant ancillary revenue stream for the property manager.
“You have to make Internet access easy for people 24/7,” Remus says. “You have to make sure that whatever your site does, it integrates with other company functions.”
One glaring example of misdirected Web site e-mail, Remus points out, is having service requests going to the leasing office rather than directly to the maintenance office. “One of the main issues why people move is slow response time for maintenance requests or lack of response,” he notes.
A commonly used Web site tool that Remus thinks is overrated is the 360 degree tour. “Do people really have the bandwidth to use them? And are their pop-ups not blocked so they can see them?” Flash screens can also be annoying, he adds.
Another failing, Remus adds, is a lack of publicity for resident Web sites. “A lot of effort is typically spent on developing and integrating these tools and yet often they’re not well promoted.” And since turnover is often high among property management staff, he points out, these messages about community Web site features and benefits should also be repeated when training new employees.
“I think the biggest thing that the property management industry has to get to is the fact that you can research apartments on line but you can’t actually lease on line. And having live inventory on line is huge, too.”
An irony is the widely accepted view that the property management industry has been late adopters of technology, but is making up for lost time, while its prospects are technologically savvy and are on line 24/7.
Despite all the advanced tools that today’s property managers have at their disposal, Remus points out that lack of follow-through is a problem. “People need systems to better manage their Web leads and site visitors.”
A key omission, according to Remus, is the fact that most Web sites are only in English. “Are we adequately serving the growing ethnic markets with 99 percent of Web sites only in English?”
“Property management is my first love and always has been,” admits Remus. He’s sold a number of multifamily units over the years and still owns a number of triplexes and duplexes at the moment, in addition to having been a real estate broker for the past 18 years. A mountain climber in his spare time, Remus believes that real estate investors are risk takers by nature and enjoys that side of the business as well. “I like the challenge of real estate.”
Previously, Remus co-founded Apartment Solutions Inc./Reslynx, which offered fee-based virtual leasing offices throughout the East, as well as call-center enterprise software for leasing communications. In 2003, Remus and his partners sold the company to Weichert Realtors Inc., which later formed Weichert Rental Network, where he served as its vice president of sales and marketing.
Property Centric (www.propertycentric.com) is a subsidiary of Vortaloptics, a software development company specializing in Net-native ASP search solutions that is headquartered in Las Vegas.
