Blog
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!…
Guest Blog: Leading the Pack: Technology Trends that Give Multifamily Executives the Modern Edge
By Nat Kunes, Vice President of Product, AppFolio Property Manager In today’s competitive market, multifamily professionals need to bring their “A” game. While the market ebbs and flows, finding the best team to run your business and making the most cost-effective decisions are always going to be essential components of a strong business strategy. Making sure you have the most modern tech tools to keep an edge is essential. Don’t let your current management practices prevent you from saving time and money, and adding more value to your properties. We recently commissioned SurveyMonkey to uncover the success secrets among the nation’s…
‘What Renters Want’ with Jessica Fiur: Kids of Today’s Renters are Tomorrow’s Renters. Here’s How to Get Them.
When many apartment marketing teams put together their marketing plans, they usually target adults. OK, sometimes student housing communities will target the students, but really, even then it’s mostly to their parents. But why shouldn’t they? Adults are the ones with the money. Why bother marketing to kids? After all, they’re noisy and messy and usually can’t afford the rent. Teenagers are even worse. Completely useless! (Trust me, I used to be one.) Except… Except that the kids will grow up to be teenagers, who will grow up to be adults, who will, in general, want to move out of…
‘What Renters Want’ with Jessica Fiur: 5 Reasons Renting Trumps Owning (As Told by a Former Renter)
To [poorly] paraphrase that old commercial for bald guys, “I’m not just an editor for a multifamily publication, I’m also a renter.” Or, at least I was. Recently, I bought a house. So, bye bye, renting, at least for the foreseeable future, and, hello, bright pink walls if I so choose (not that my husband would necessarily go for that, but he’s the only hurdle), growing equity (fingers crossed) and lingering guilt about ordering a $4.30 carmel macchiato when I have mortgage payments to make (totally worth it though). And, though I was, and am, focused on the positives of…
Guest Blog: Green Amenities for Multi-Housing: Plug-in Electric Vehicle Chargers
By Christine Kehoe, Executive Director, California Plug-In Electric Vehicle Collaborative Chances are you’ve seen a plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) on the road, parked at the mall, or even driving in your neighborhood. These days, it’s not uncommon. There are more than 234,000 PEVs in the nation and many vehicle models from which people can choose. Cities such as Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle have the highest rates of PEV adoption in the country, which includes a large number of people living in apartments and condominiums. This presents a big opportunity for properties to install PEV charging…