Multifamily Marketplace Innovations

Recap by Paul Bergeron

Apartments.com held its Spring Multifamily Insights Forum on April 21, featuring a day of national and local economic insights, changes in renter behavior, and innovations in search technology.

Apartments.com is leading the way with apartment listing innovation, giving customers upgraded features, and improved dynamic listings through its ongoing developments and enhancements from the past year.

Dan Russotto, Vice President of Product, Apartments.com, guided a discussion as part of Apartments.com’s Spring Multifamily Insights Forum.

Factors driving the need for innovation the past year mostly focused on the pandemic and uncertain conditions in the United States economy based on jobs.

Renter preferences are changing as more people are moving from urban locations to the suburbs. Recently, that trend has started to boomerang as downtown rents fall in many markets and the country recovers from COVID-19.

On the development side, there’s been a 33 percent spike in investment (to $148 billion). It’s in part to fulfill the urban boomerang. Apartment seekers are looking for dedicated living spaces within their apartments because “work from home” is here to stay.

With so many continuing to work from home, these residents need more room in their homes to establish workspaces.

During their apartment searches, they also sought more virtualization to gather information, and desired less personal interaction. Today’s prospect is not like years ago when seekers visited 15 communities in person before narrowing their lists.

Renters: Be Specific

Renters want more specifics and less general information. It’s not just about touring to view models: they want to be shown available units that are personalized to fit their lifestyles and homes that are precise to their needs.

Renters are demanding increasing service and maintenance; they expect faster response time from on-site teams to meet their needs.

They expect communities to develop virtualized resident networking connections. They want their properties to build a sense of community in ways that don’t require “face-to-face” engagements with their neighbors, out of caution related to the pandemic.

On that note, they look for properties with outstanding outdoor amenities and touchless technology features so they can “get in and out” and do things without having to touch surfaces. Conveniences and options regarding package delivery are also popular.

Activities wise, there is increasing demand for things related to their dogs and bikes.

Many resulting innovations deliver on search and discovery. Apartments.com has made it easier for renters to find the things they are looking for on the general listings. For example, marketers can now post the time it takes to travel to locations such as stores, restaurants, or public transportation, including time needed to get there by foot, train, or car.

Specialty Renter Groups and Discovery Apartments.com has further developed its After55.com site for senior living communities, providing key details for older residents and their adult children.

It has enhanced search capabilities within California with WestsideRentals.com. The site gives Southern California renters the largest choice of rental properties to find their perfect home while giving Southern California property owners the most exposure for their rental availabilities.

For student housing, students want their own home-searching experience. Through its acquisition of Off Campus Partners, individual sites are created that focus solely on a single campus exclusively for students, faculty, and staff, and promoted by the university. Listings include a wide range of virtual tools, by-the-bed pricing, and a roommate finder.

Visualization Technology

Visual enhancements are generating more traffic and better performance. Unit-level details displayed now go beyond the typical model image.

Because renters are becoming more cautious about inauthenticity, having experienced the bait-and-switch when they show up to find that an apartment doesn’t reflect its online images, Apartments.com cares about showing prospects what the apartment home actually looks like.

Apartments.com listings answer key questions with imagery: What is the condition of the unit? What does it look like when standing on the balcony? What is above and below the unit? What does it look like while walking the hallways? What is the condition of appliances?

Listings also enable full property maps to show where the unit is located in relation to other things at the property. Visitors can drill into a specific model by zooming in on layouts and click on single units for specific pricing and other information.

Collaborative Search

Adults, roommates, parents, and students often go apartment shopping together. Apartments.com allows its users to share lists of potential communities to explore and post individual comments that can be shared with each other digitally. Messaging between prospects and property managers has been enabled through SMS (texting).

Listing-Quality Scores

Apartments.com’s new dashboard helps marketers manage their listings, allowing communities to easily change the order of their videos or images, in a way that makes sense. The dashboards track any adjustments made and how those changes will help lead to conversions. They do this by triggering highlighted text bubbles and pop-up tips and edits to explain why a different word, phrase, image, or strategy might work better based on past performance.

Tours and Selection

3D walkthroughs have become more front and center for apartment seekers. Listings allow prospects to zoom, walk around, and experience different photo angles. It also can create full video tours. Even better, it allows prospective residents to record their own video tours in 3D and edit them later as they wish.

Virtual Tours

Virtual touring is here to stay. It helps prospects to see the apartment home while they chat with the leasing agent and without having to visit the community.

Self-Guided Tours

Advancements in smart-lock integration give prospects the chance to tour on their own, and on their own time. Working with partner companies such as Rently, prospects’ identities are verified and their credit card information is captured to allow access and limit liability to the owners.

Convert & Finalize

Apartments.com’s innovation allows marketers to analyze the quality of leads generated. It designates a “New True Lead” on the dashboard that shares: How did they find you? What messages were left with the prospect and when? Did they tour the unit, etc.?

It also includes an ad analytics tool that checks area rent comps for price and miscellaneous details, charts the ad’s history, and calculates what type of engagement it created such as number of impressions, etc.

Online Leasing

All required tools and lease documents - such as rental payment capture - help make online leasing more efficient for communities by requiring less paperwork.

To view this or any other Apartments.com Spring Multifamily Insights Forum session, please visit apartments.com/springforum.