The Demand Solutions Blog

If you're anything like me, then this is the time of year when your nightstand groans with books that friends and family kindly sent you over the holidays. You feel grateful and daunted at the workload entailed in reading those books in equal measure! You reach for recommendations and reviews and other data points to decide which text gets to the top of the pile.

Every now and then a business book comes along that everyone in your field seems to talk about and recommend. One such book from a few years ago was The Challenger Sale - a text that was so revolutionary when first published in 2011 that it has become a framework for sales strategy, talent management, and training in sales-driven companies ever since. While the book centers on research carried out in B2B sales organizations, its findings are highly relevant to multifamily leasing. Here I will explain why that is.

In the closing weeks of 2018 I had the pleasure of interviewing 20 leaders in multifamily operations and technology about the outlook for 2019 and beyond. The content of those conversations will be discussed in detail on this site in a few weeks’ time, but in the meantime, one theme emerged that seems to be a 2019 priority for everybody: leasing.

That’s right folks, as the hangovers wear off and the post-holiday diets wear on, it’s normal to think about new year’s resolutions. And for many in multifamily, plans to re-vamp, re-focus and in many cases re-think their companies’ sales processes are top of the list.  There are several different reasons for this. The now seemingly perennial question mark over whether the bull market on rents will add yet another year to its already historic trend provides a natural motivation for operators to get better at converting leads.

Happy new year everyone! Now that the holidays are over, we turn to resolute goal setting for the year to come. My gift to you is a big box of unrealized revenue - if you can make it your 2019 resolution to find it.   

The source of this revenue is unit amenities. This is nowhere near a new concept, and I’m sure you are currently utilizing amenity pricing on your assets as most of the industry now is. However, the amount of revenue we’ve uncovered in our client work from doing amenity analysis is always surprising (maybe even stunning) so much so that it’s hard to remark that as an industry, we’re managing amenity pricing well. There aren’t many ways to dig up that much value so quickly, which is why I’m always shocked that more people aren’t regularly doing this exercise. 

For my New Year’s resolution, I want to focus on how to better develop associates and create environments in which they will be successful. In short, for my own company, “make it less about me,” which I can’t help but notice is also critical for our clients. The more success is based on a single leader’s energy and knowledge, the less stable that success will be—whether just for one department or for an entire company. 

So how can we make success something permanent and less dependent on us individually? It’s definitely not easy, but I think it’s clear. It rests on 3 inter-related tasks: 

Just before a 29-year-old friend of mine was due to stay in a fairly upscale hotel recently, the staff texted her before check-in and suggested that she join the loyalty program, hinting that it would be beneficial during her stay.   

She did, and the hotel upgraded her to a suite instead of a room and also gave her a card for a free glass of wine. My friend was thrilled and the hotel earned a customer for life. 

They accomplished that by making her feel like she and her hard-earned money were valued. My friend, who is a millennial and a journalist, isn’t making a lot of money now, but her income is likely to increase in the next few years. When she can afford that suite herself, she’s very likely to book at the same hotel. 

New Year’s resolutions typically revolve around some type of change. It might be a change to our routine and well-being (such as fitness, yoga or meditation) or a change within ourselves (Weight loss seems to be a popular one post-holiday indulgence!)   However, although people make resolutions somewhere around the beginning of January, many of us have forgotten or abandoned them within about a month.    

The New Year is often prime time for change within companies. However, just like the New Year’s resolutions people attempt, those changes get lost or forgotten if they are not planned and executed well.   

Chad Greiwe is what you could call a jack of all trades. He’s the executive vice president of operations at the Gene B. Glick Company, one of the largest privately held real estate ownership, development and management firms in the country, with more than 20,000 units in 13 states. At Glick, Greiwe is responsible for strategic planning and oversight of the company’s operations vision. The Indiana native’s responsibilities in this role include the oversight of property management, maintenance, information technology, purchasing, training, financial and regulatory compliance, and marketing outreach. Before his time at Glick, Greiwe served as an advisor to the company while working with Katz, Sapper & Miller, where he specialized in serving clients in the real estate industry. Greiwe is a licensed real estate broker, a CPA and a member of both the Indiana Society of Certified Public Accountants and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. He is also an active board member at the Indiana Apartment Association and Connect2Help 211. 

Sometimes new technologies and strategies change the way that we do business. More frequently, though, things that have worked in one industry find their way into other sectors, leading to fresh innovation. In multifamily, it is often the hotel industry that supplies some of the most plausible new ways to sell, market and deliver the experiences that define our industry.

Success equals talent plus luck. No one knows this more than Linda Early.

Linda got her first gig in the multifamily industry by chance (otherwise known as sisterly persuasion) after graduating with a Biology degree from James Madison University. Years later, she established herself as a vice president for Archstone. Then, came AvalonBay Communities. Today, Linda is a vice president with Brookfield Properties Corporation - and she has a lot to say on not just where she’s been, but where she - and the industry - are going.   

In our new series, we’ll be tackling common and frequently asked questions from operators and operator executives in the multi-family housing industry.  

Ask a multifamily operations-focused executive what their biggest concerns are, and it likely won’t take long for the topic of staffing—and by extension, turnover—to  come up. High turnover rates have a number of negative implications for operators, including hiring costs, lost productivity, lower sales results and more.