Blog
What Renters Want with Jessica Fiur: The Importance of Package Management
Packages. They’re not something we normally think about, until we’re waiting to get one. (And, since it’s the holiday season now, it seems like all the time.) It doesn’t seem like that sexy of an amenity. I mean, give me a virtual golf simulator, a concierge that can get me restaurant reservations, hell, even a standard pool sounds sexier than “package storage area,” amiright, folks? But, no. Packages are the thing. This was a huge topic at the recent NMHC OpTech conference (read the transcript from our recent Twitter chat that addressed some of these topics). Rick Haughey, vice president, industry…
What Renters Want with Jessica Fiur: Celebrating Thanksgiving at Your Student Housing Communities
It’s that time of year. Time for turkey, stuffing, and young adults coming home to their parents’ house with a mountain of dirty laundry. Around Thanksgiving, many students head home, which will probably leave your student housing community pretty empty in the coming week. Before everyone clears out for the holiday, here are some things you can do around the community to make the holiday easier. Offer shuttles to the bus/train station. The week of Thanksgiving, since many of your student residents are probably going to be traveling, a great feature you could offer your residents is a free shuttle bus…
Guest Blog: Canada vs. The United States: Comparing Student Housing Markets
By Darren Vanecko, President, Places4Students.com Over the past decade, the student housing market in the United States has been rapidly expanding with the boom of purpose-built student housing. With each passing year, the number of student housing bed deliveries seems to be increasing alongside enrollment rates. The same, however, cannot be said about Canada. Yes, enrollment rates are increasing in Canada, but student housing isn’t advancing in conjunction with these rates. There are a variety of potential reasons why Canada is lagging behind USA, such as smaller population, regional disparity, lack of market research, unwillingness from major REITs to invest…
What Renters Want with Jessica Fiur: Should Your Community Have a Guest Suite?
There are amenities, and then there are amenities. Sure, gyms and car changing stations and swimming pools are all well and good. But what about a guest suite? An amenity that will prevent that weirdo friend from college (whom you haven’t talked to in 15 years but is going to be in town and wants to catch up, which you just know will involve lots of tequila on his part while you can maybe have one or two, but, seriously, there’s work tomorrow, and you have to get the kids to school and oh my god, when did you get…
Guest Blog: How to Prepare your Rental Property for a Safe and Fun Halloween
By Nicoleta Iudean Halloween—the most fang-tastic celebration of the year—is just around the corner. Most of your residents, both kids and grownups, will keep busy these days with choosing the spookiest costumes, buying sweets, carving pumpkins and putting up creepy decorations in their apartments. On the other hand, you—as a landlord or property manager—face some serious concerns: the safety of your residents and of your rental properties during this festival of mischief. So, should you “trick” or should you “treat”? There’s a fine line between being too strict (by issuing specific property regulations for October 31st in order to ensure…
Guest Blog: Fighting Fire with Planning, Preparation and Communication: What Multifamily Managers Need to Know
By Brian Taylor, Executive Director, Talega Maintenance Corporation, Managed by FirstService Residential Managers of multifamily properties face critical challenges every day. They perform multiple tasks simultaneously, proactively assessing and enacting strategies to improve property features and systems, developing and implementing marketing plans and reacting to the troubles that surface on any given day. Inevitably, managers are likely to spend at least some time putting out fires, regardless of the amount of time spent planning and organizing. Of course, we are talking about the figurative kind of fire here, but managers need to be ready to combat the real ones as well….
What Renters Want with Jessica Fiur: The Simpsons, Family Guy and Multifamily Community Outreach
You are either a Simpsons fan, or a Family Guy fan. Sure, they both have similar premises, and they’ve both been running forever. But The Simpsons used to be is clever and offers an endless supply of quotable lines (ex: “You’ll have to speak up! I’m wearing a towel!”), while Family Guy is meaner and always gets that stupid Bird is the Word song stuck in your head for like a week (sorry about that). So you wouldn’t think there’d be much overlap in terms of marketing, etc. They both have their audience, and they do their own thing and…
Guest Blog: Tackling Seismic Retrofits
By Homer Yim, Territorial Manager, Simpson Strong-Tie Twenty-five years ago, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area. Lasting only seconds, the quake measured 6.9 on the Richter scale and left thousands of residents homeless. The images were unforgettable: Neighborhoods on fire, failing bridges, and homes in the Marina District collapsing in heaps of shattered wood. Almost immediately following the quake, the City of San Francisco initiated the Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety (CAPSS) working group to study impacts from the next major earthquake, which included a 30-year resiliency plan to prevent the collapse of buildings in…
‘What Renters Want’ with Jessica Fiur: Are You Doing This Crucial Step for New Employees?
In high school, I got a job at a well-known undergarment chain store at the mall as a sales associate. My first day at work, I was given a tape measure to wear around my neck and was told to stand in the front of the store. I knew nothing about the different fabric or styles or even prices. I had never worked in a store before, let alone with customers. As the day wore on, both the customers and I got more and more frustrated as they would ask me for help finding a particular item, and I had…
‘What Renters Want’ with Jessica Fiur: Using U2’s New Album Strategy for Multifamily
A lot of new and surprising things were revealed during Apple’s announcement this week, besides the fact that we’re all throwing out our current functioning phones to get the iPhone 6 (which is neither new nor surprising, but rather old news, and, at this point, frankly a cliche): We can soon pay for everything with the same device we use to send people requests to play Candy Crush! We will be able to send our resting heartbeat to our friends via our watches, for some reason! And U2 is releasing a new album and giving it to everyone for free!…