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A guarantee is a powerful tool—for marketing, leasing and quality service —for five reasons:

1. A guarantee forces you to focus on residents. Knowing what residents want is the sine qua non in offering a service guarantee. A community has to identify its residents' expectations about the elements of the service and the importance they attach to each. Lacking this knowledge of residents needs, a community that wants to guarantee its service may very well guarantee the wrong things.

2. A guarantee sets clear standards. A specific, unambiguous service guarantee sets standards for your company and community. It tells employees what the company stands for.

3. A guarantee generates feedback. A guarantee creates the goal; it defines what you must do to satisfy your residents. Next, you need to know when you go wrong. A guarantee forces you to create a system for discovering errors—which the Japanese call "golden nuggets" because they're opportunities to learn.

4. A guarantee forces you to understand why you fail. In developing a guarantee, managers must ask questions like these: What failure points exist in our system? If failure points can be identified, can their origins be traced and overcome?

5. A guarantee builds marketing and leasing strength. Perhaps the most obvious reason for offering a strong service guarantee is its ability to boost marketing and leasing efforts. It encourages future residents to lease by reducing the risk of the leasing decision, and it generates more loyalty. Keeping most of your residents and getting positive word of mouth, though desirable in any business, are particularly important for the multifamily industry. The cost of resident dissatisfaction is enormous. In this respect, it's fair to say that many companies' biggest competitors are themselves. A guarantee will only work, of course, if you start with commitment to the resident. If your aim is to minimize the guarantee's impact on your community  but to maximize its marketing and leasing punch, you won't succeed. In the long run, you will nullify the guarantee's potential impact on residents, and your marketing dollars will go down the drain.

Years ago Multifamilypro conducted  a study with the help of multifamily management expert Ed Kelley to determine whether the time spent shopping for an apartment home had a discernible impact on the length of a resident’s stay.  The results confirmed what many of us have long suspected, and still ring as true today as they did when the study was first conducted.

Leasing Professionals have long suspected that a resident who waits to within three weeks of his/her move date to select a new apartment home, will likely stay in that apartment home for a shorter period of time.  To test our suspicions, we examined the records of 200 residents to determine if such a pattern really does exist.  We chose a middle to upper middle class community in each of four cities (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Denver) to conduct our study.  Records of residents who rented two years previously were randomly selected, and then sorted into three groupings (according to whether they needed a new apartment home “now”, “soon”, or sometime in the future).

The first group (our “Now” group) contained the rental histories of people who moved into their apartment within 21 days of their rental application.  The second group (our “Soon” group), contained the histories of people who allowed between 21 and 60 days of lead time from application to move-in.  Our “Future” group included those residents who began looking and/or made their choice more than 60 days in advance of their move-in date.

The results of our research showed a very distinctive pattern.  Lease terms were definitely shorter among our “Now” group, significantly longer among our “Soon” group, and markedly longest among our “Future” group.  Why?  We know from experience that people tend to follow patterns in many of their personal activities, including the choice of a new home.  People who invest more time in the decision making process are likely to do so because they intend to live with that decision for some time to come.  It’s often true that people who exhibit patience and prudence in choosing an apartment home will exhibit these qualities in other areas of their life, making them better residents and neighbors in our communities.  Whatever the reasons may be, the results of our study speak for themselves.  Try this experiment with your own leasing records, and your findings will likely reflect ours!

Avoid the temptation to take less seriously those future residents who don’t have to make an immediate decision.  Take them as seriously as the visitors who come to you with more immediate needs.  Our study shows that our special advance shoppers are worth their “wait” in gold!

How do you think this translates when we studied concessions? To be continued...

"YOUR COMPETITION COSTS LESS" This is the objection most likely to strike fear into the hearts of an unprepared leasing consultant. First, be certain that the future resident is really considering value, rather than just comparing price. Guide them through a fair "apples to apples" comparison of features and benefits that shows where you have more to offer and why. Summarize your comparison by proving that your community's overall value is much greater than the price difference they may perceive. That small difference represents a far greater commitment to quality and resident satisfaction than they'll find anywhere else. You're the best, and you're well worth your rental value!

We have found that communities across the country have the idea that rent increases in $ 50 and $70 increments are effective because they are  easily  to remember, and the accounting team will have an easier time with those numbers. Unfortunately, rent increases like our rental rates, cause an adverse reaction when they are in even amounts. Residents interpret a $45.00 rent increase as example of the community making money. At the same time, an increase of $46 is often perceived as an amount to answer a specific need, to cover increased operating costs of the same amount. Round ($50.00, $60.00, $70.00) are associated with the community wanting more money at the resident's expense. Odd numbers, both in the amount of the increase and the actual rental rate amount, will suggest a closely calculated operating budget. So use $27 instead of $25.00, $41 instead of $40.00, and so on.

The last time you played "let's pretend," chances are you were only concerned with the three R's (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic). This time, we're going to play a grown-up game of let's pretend, where you get to be the Resident or Future Resident -and we've got four R's to contend with (Rentals, Renewals, Retention, and Results).

Several months ago ona consulting assignment, we had half of the employees at a community pretend to be Residents, and the other half pretend to be Future Residents. They were instructed to leave the community, then return as residents or future residents in order to gain some fresh insight. Their observations might teach you a thing or two about your own community. Here's what they found:

• There were no clear signs in the parking lot telling future residents where they could or couldn't park.
• Trees and bushes had grown over the main entrance sign so that both future residents and visitors to current residents had trouble identifying the community.
• As a child visiting the community, our pretenders had a pretty boring view in the leasing center clubhouse. They suggested hanging photographs of the leasing and service staff along with a brief statement that tells something interesting about them, like their favorite hobbies.
• The signs throughout the community sounded like someone had a bad attitude.
• When the leasing center was closed for a few minutes, there was no place for the visitor to sit and wait, and no system for leaving a message.
• The staff wasn't prepared for rainy weather with raincoats or over-sized umbrellas to share with Future Residents; and there were no mats to prevent water and mud from being tracked in when showing an apartment.
• The main entry door to the office was difficult to open.

And the list went on! This very simple exercise identified plenty of areas that needed attention; and focused the employees on what was needed in order to more effectively serve their current and future residents.

Try it with your own staff. If you think your staff will have trouble viewing your community objectively as a Resident or Future Resident, invite the staff from another community to come in and pick it apart. Picking your community apart is a good thing. Imagine how much better it will be when you put it all back together-the right way!

Go ahead...Give it a try...play a grown-up game of let's pretend and increase your Four R's