Check this article for several websites that will be helpful to landlords wanting information about competitive rents and vacancy factors in their area and also helpful ideas for marketing your apartment units.

New applications are putting your properties all over Internet maps. You’d better know how your units plot out.

Source: MULTIFAMILY EXECUTIVE MAGAZINE Publication date: June 1, 2008

By Joe Bousquin, a freelance journalist living outside Sacramento, Calif.

Curious to see how your rents stack up against the competition? Log on to Rentometer.com, an apartment mapping tool aimed at small owners and potential residents. There, you’ll see comparable units in your neighborhood, both rented and available, along with their respective rents, all plotted on a Google map. How about quantifiable, comparative data on the convenience of your property’s location to use as a marketing tool? No problem. Visit Score.com, which gives your address a “walkabilityâ€? score based on its proximity to restaurants, shops, libraries, parks, and other amenities.

Got a GPS-enabled cell phone? Download the Smarter Agent application and you’ll get a
GPS-generated map of available units in your area with direct links and phone numbers to the
appropriate leasing office.

With the advances in location-based mapping technologies on the Internet in recent years, more and more applications are emerging that can literally put multifamily properties on the map. Many of them are being developed by third-party firms that have little direct connection to the multifamily industry, yet how they’re being used—by both prospective residents and your competition—can directly impact your bottom line. Observers say understanding these technologies, where they’re headed, and how they portray your properties is increasingly important in order to stay ahead of the competition for residents.

Take Trace Lofts, a $30 million, two-building, 142-unit condo project created by Seattle developer Ted Schroth. Located in the heart of the city’s Capitol Hill district, Trace Lofts has been marketing its perfect WalkScore of 100 since October. Despite the dreary housing market, Seattle-based broker ek Real Estate Group has been able to sell 37 of the 42 units in the project’s first building, thanks in large part to the credibility of the WalkScore metric.
“Our WalkScore has played into at least half of our sales,â€? says Damon Thomas, a site sales agent whose office hung a giant banner touting Trace’s WalkScore on the side of the building after stumbling upon the Web site. “It really helps because it’s not just us talking about the neighborhood. It’s an independent third party—somebody else who’s saying, ‘These are the characteristics here.’â€?

WHAT THE WEB OFFERS

Perhaps most interesting is WalkScore’s origins, which have little to do with the multifamily industry. The Web site was built by Seattle-based Front Seat Management, a social purpose firm founded by former Microsoft executive Mike Mathieu. “Front Seat’s primary goal is to promote environmental living,â€? says Matt Lerner, Front Seat’s chief technology officer. “The WalkScore site is just one of our projects that helps us do that.â€?

The program is indicative of a larger trend to use online marketing sources for your property—some of which you may not even be aware. For instance, Google Maps, an Internet-based mapping application that allows software developers to create new programs around it, now offers a “street viewâ€? with actual ground-level photographs for some addresses. Search for 2000 Post Apartments in San Francisco, a 304-unit wrap community owned by Denver-based REIT UDR, for instance, and you’ll see a street-level photograph taken at the corner of Post and Steiner streets. The image shows the elegant glass-and-masonry façade of the Jones Memorial United Methodist Church across the street from the building.

While that street view could be a selling point, other sites may not fare as well, depending on their immediate surroundings. “We take fantastic photos for our clients, but we can’t really do anything about the eyesore across the street,â€? points out Chris Brown, vice president of product development at Internet listing service Apartments.com. “The kind of information consumers can get now using these new mapping technologies changes the game quite a bit. Now, the neighborhood amenities have become far more visible.â€?

WHAT YOUR RENTERS KNOW

In fact, industry observers say the game now revolves around the information that potential residents an get about your apartments, whether you give it to them or not. For instance, revenue management systems have finally allowed owners and managers to push rents to maximize revenue. But the increasing availability of comparative rent data to the public may give residents a way to push back. At Rentometer.com, a Web site launched by Newton, Mass.-based Investment Instruments, a property management firm that provides marketing and rent-collection services to smaller landlords, residents can see how the deal they’re getting compares to rents in the neighborhood. A recent search in Sacramento, Calif.’s leafy Tahoe Park neighborhood of starter homes and rentals, for instance, showed that a studio apartment with a monthly rent of $700 fell in the sweet spot of average rents among 117 comparable units within a 2.6-mile radius. But another studio unit listed for $1,075 elicited this recommendation from the Web site: “Your rental unit should be in top condition and have more amenities than the median rental in your area. If it does not, then your rent may be way too high.â€?

Because the site includes data from individual landlords as well as listing services such as
ForRent.com and Rent. com, the application provides insight into the elusive “shadow marketâ€? for rentals, says Allison Atsiknoudas, Investment Instrument’s CEO. “I would say that the majority of the data [comes from individual landlords], which helps us provide a very accurate picture of the marketplace.â€?

Armed with such comparative rental information, potential residents—or even current ones—might rethink their decision about living in your property. On the other hand, in order for your listings to appear on sites such as Rentometer.com, you have to provide the relevant data.

WHAT THE COMPETITION KNOWS

All of these innovations make competition in the multifamily industry even tougher. “It just means you have to compete way more on services, amenities, and the experience. You’re providing a place to live now; the product has become much more of a commodity in the last five to 10 years,â€? says Dan Haefner, chief information officer at Atlanta-based owner and manager Lane Co., which partners with MyNewPlace.com to map its units, while also feeding data to several other listing services.To stay ahead, of course, you need to know what your competition is doing. That’s where applications such as PadZing come in. A mapping-enabled comparable rent database developed by Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Realty Data Trust, PadZing lets owners see average rents for a particular unit type in any given city or zip code as well as vacancy rates—a key factor in making acquisition and development decisions. Haefner, for instance, says Lane has used the application to do just that.

Realty CEO Mike Mueller says PadZing will ultimately plug into Microsoft’s mapping software, which will allow users to draw their own neighborhood boundaries and see what’s for rent in a given area. Since it pulls real-time numbers from the property management systems of Realty’s VaultWare clients, Mueller says it’s a highly accurate tool. “Apartment owners and managers [can] benchmark the performance of their property against the marketplace in real time,â€? Mueller says. “It’s Zillow for the apartment industry.â€?

And as the real estate valuation Web site Zillow did with for-sale housing, mapping applications
focused on apartments will arm renters with more information than ever before. Whether that’s good or bad for apartment owners depends on how they work the technology. But one thing’s for certain:

When it comes to information, knowing is better than not knowing. And it’s up to you to figure out where your properties fall on the map.

I frequently talk with investors and hear investors talking about how they are scared to death of “getting stuck with a property�. I think we all know, or at least have heard, prices have come down in most markets, there are a lot of houses on the market and good deals are to be had. However, what sense does it make to buy a property if you can’t sell it? I have blogged in the past about how homes are still selling albeit at a slower rate and only the “right� properties or those in good areas that are a good value are selling.

But what about renting? Who cares if you can’t sell a property as long as you can get a good tenant who is going to cover your mortgage, taxes, insurance, etc? Finding cash flow properties is a much easier task now that prices have come down. Areas that have historically been difficult to buy positive cash flow properties in are now full of cash flowing properties. The market is going to turn positive. It is a very lucrative strategy to be buying properties now at a discount, renting them out for some positive cash flow and waiting until prices start moving north again. Once prices start moving up again, those that bought, will be sitting on a significant amount of equity and great cash flowing investments.

I’ve included a brief article about rental demand and where rents have gone lately.

Rental Demand Pushes Rates Up

It’s getting harder for renters to find an affordable place to live with rents rising and availability falling.

The median asking rate for rentals has jumped 14 percent, from $591 a month during the fourth quarter of 2003 to $673 a month in 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Vacancy rates are down from last year, and average rent is projected to rise 5.3 percent in 2008, up from a 3.1 percent increase in 2007, according to the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®.

“We’ve seen demand for rental housing go up,” says Mark Obrinsky, chief economist at the National Multi Housing Council. “The ownership side is retrenching, and we’re seeing the demand going to the rental side. There’s a lot of hesitancy to buy. Others can’t get (financing), so they’re remaining renters longer.”

Here are median rents for the first quarter of 2008 in 12 major metropolitan areas:

Atlanta: $986
Austin: $907
Boston: $1,645
Chicago: $1,355
Las Vegas: $1,056
Los Angeles: $1,699
Miami: $1,368
New York: $1,751
Phoenix: $939
San Francisco: $1,810
Seattle: $1,211
Washington D.C.: $1,687

Source: Rentometer and USA Today, Mark W. Williams (04/22/2008)

Posted by Carter Brown

PETS IN RENTAL HOUSING

A March 2007 survey of apartment renters by www.Apartments.com found that 84.4% of the renters surveyed owned a pet.  Some major apartment property owners such as Forest City and Lincoln Property Co. are taking note of this and acknowledgeing that pet owners love their pets and, in many cases, have trouble finding apartments that will accept pets.  Some of these apartment owners are adopting the attitude that they want to be pet friendly in order to attract more tenants.  One apartment owner has even gone so far as to have a dog in the lobby of the building to welcome prospective tenants.  Of course they screen the pets for good behavior and charge additional fees for the pets in accordance with the market.

With the rapid growth in the idea that pets are really “part of the family” it will behoove apartment owners to review their “no pets” policies periodically and see if they need to make some modifications to be competitive.