Lifestyle is such an overused word, although I like the way our friends over at Village Green use the term Lifestyle For Rent. The point of this post is; When is the last time that you questioned yourself about what business you are we really in.
I have always thought that if we could deliver enough value from our Urbane Web Site, Urbane Blog and The Urbane Lobby, That renting an apartment became secondary, our communities would always remain full.
We get a heck of a lot of web traffic, over 10,000 visitors a month, and growing at a rate of 35% month over month, far more than your average (360) unit apartment web site. At the Urbane Underground, our office space is pretty open, and the point at which Heather starts the Leasing Experience is just outside my cube area, only hidden away by bamboo plants and rolling walls. Point is, I get to “listen in” on nearly every tour.
What I hear over and over, or at least get the sense of is that one of the Prospects biggest challenges or Pain Point is “Time” or lack thereof. It takes a lot of time to search for an apartment. We are createing a spot on our web site, and on our Availability Landing Page, Urbane Living Best Picks that will showcase the best other apartment units available. Urbane will “Filter” the comps to match up like product, pricing and web site links, so that the prospect only had to go to one place for comps.
Is there a real benefit to the prospect to have a filtered apartment search, and is that wacky to send a prospect to the competitor, which they are likely going to visit anyway. Could you build enough trust for it to work right? We think so.
We are starting to create alliances with our competitors now, with like or similar product type and we plan to start to help market their communities and units for rent on our Urbane Web Sites. We are close to finishing negotiations with the first try at this.
Our goal is to create a site that is everything for an Urbane Lifestyle, Restaurants, Movie Ratings, Theater Tickets, Hyper Local News, Hip and Cool People and Businesses and including Living Space, from both Urbane Apartments and other local like apartment and condo competitors.
We are giving it a try at the Urbane Lab and will keep you posted of the results.
Eric’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for a major Midwest apartment developer. He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience.
He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested. Eric has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.
You can connect with Eric_Urbane on Twitter.
Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications;
Related Posts -
Video Marketing for Apartments: Entertain the Prospect We are fooling around with Video Marketing here at the Urbane Lab. Our latest series of videos, which are intended to poke fun at the "Beige Box" down the street are starting to gain some traction. Three of the five videos have been up on our web site for about ten...... -
How Are You Measuring Your Web Site Conversions? Apartment Marketers, Do you know your web site conversion numbers? If so, what are you tracking? It is refreshing to see apartment marketers taking stock and owning their web site traffic. Some are even creating their own Branded Media. As internet marketing continues to permeate the apartment industry we need to look at web site analytics and...... -
Facebook Has Become a Leasing Lead Generator We have written a lot about Facebook Marketing here at The Urbane Lab, both good and bad. We are starting to shift our opinion about this monster platform and seeing it as a leasing lead generator. Each month we are watching Facebook climb up the rankings as a real Traffic Source for our...... -
Take Control of Your Web Site Traffic We ran an article last week about web site conversion titled How Are You Measuring Your Web Site Conversations, which outlined what the various ways that Google Analytics categorizes your web traffic. One of the things that can confuse things is New Traffic verses Reoccurring Traffic. At Urbane Apartments, we separate our marketing traffic from our resident traffic,...... - What Is The Value of Clicking Your Web Site First We posted about the new launch of Community Sherpa here a few days ago, and also over at Multifamily Insiders. Disclosure, I have no ties to Community Sherpa and have not tested the product. I am just delighted that someone has produced a product that they can actually sell. Again,......
Related Websites - Make Cash Online With Personalizing Member Site Software When you have decided to utilize member site software to create money on the web, you've got most likely made a wise selection, but you need to make sure that it can be personalized to reflect the truth that it can be your member site and that your shoppers fully......
- Seven Most New Website Design Trends Web development will never continues to be the same, should you dont choose in order to trail behind, be sure you consider these latest web development styles. 1. HTML5 and CSS3 All these solutions were long anxiously waited for and today these are implemented in all of the fashionable sites.......
- Search Engine Optimization For Dummies Many people have said to me that they can't afford to employ a SEO company, but they would still like to get better search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN searches. Are there any basic rules that they can follow to improve their ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs)?......
-
Search Engine Optimization Keyword Analysis Keyword analysis is an important part of search engine optimization or SEO, because your keywords will play a vital role in numerous different facets of your website design, creation and ongoing development. Before going into the details about what keyword analysis is, you should first understand a little bit about...... -
How Many Channels Can You Manage The folks at eMarketer floated the question this week, Are Fewer Channels Better? It is an excellent question, and one that every apartment marketer should incorporate into their strategy, how many different places, or digital channels can you really be effectively. And does it matter how many? “There is a fair amount of learning......
