Effective-Leadership-In-Multifamily

Developing Effective Leadership in Multifamily

Being graced with the responsibility of leadership can simultaneously be exciting and intimidating. You may be confronted with difficult scenarios where many people may be turning to you for answers or depending on you to know how to handle tough situations. You have to communicate with staff and residents, integrate your tech staff, ensure tenants are satisfied, comply with state and company regulations, ensure the community is safe, and that’s just a few. 

In these cases, when stress is high or comradery may feel low, it is important to know how to encourage your team and yourself to maintain effective leadership in the workplace. Here are our top tips for you to reflect on when developing effective leadership!

1. Stand confident in your decision-making for effective leadership

When in a leadership position, your team wants to trust that you are ready to take tasks on head first. This can best be accomplished by having confidence that your decisions are what’s best for the team objective. 

Not only that, being decisive enhances your efficiency and inspires team members to stand confident in your guidance to the best outcome. Understand that you may not always be the “good guy” to your residents, prospects, and team. However, by standing next to your decisions, it will gain you the respect and authority needed to manage day-to-day interactions.

2. Set an example of your own expectations

We have all been there, and nothing is more disappointing than having a leader or boss who can’t meet their expectations. When you are a leader, it is crucial to set an example of your own expectations. This not only fosters respect between one another but also displays your own sense of responsibility and the variety of your attitude toward accomplishing the team’s goals. 

Some of the most common aspects to set expectations include: 

  • Lease Terms and Rent
  • Maintenance and Repairs
  • Amenities and Common Areas
  • Quite Hours and Noise Policies
  • Pet Policies
  • Parking
  • Security
  • Communication
  • Emergency Procedures
  • Renewal/Move Out
  • Fair Housing

3. Encourage open communication

Communication is always considered the number one thing when it comes to establishing a strong relationship, no matter what kind of relationship it may be. Being authentic in your interactions and truly listening to what your team has to say is beneficial to the team and your self-reflection as a leader. Encourage different opinions and use them to your advantage. Allowing open communication can foster new ideas and promote new solutions. 

Cultivating a positive relationship with your team is the best way to exemplify your dedication to both your team and the team’s goals. Being personable with one another is the best way to build trust, respect, and humility within the workplace. This will not only further your own effectiveness as a leader but also encourage the overall comradery of your team to work together. 

4. Tackle Conflict Resolution

Conflict is uncomfortable but should never be avoided. Tackle conflict resolution head-on. Addressing tenant or prospect complaints, concerns, and conflicts promptly and effectively is essential for maintaining a positive living environment and a good reputation for the property. Addressing concerns promptly allows for positive word of mouth and, often, positive online reviews for your community. 

Conflict is often inevitable within a team — it’s normal and even considered healthy. Address conflict internally, head-on, and objectively. Work with your teams to come up with a compromise that works for everyone. It may not be the easiest or even the most fun thing to do, but it is essential for growth as a team in the long run. 

5. Always continue to learn

The only way to continuously improve your leadership efficiency is to continue to learn. Be open to learning new methods or techniques, admit when you make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and seek out new ways to effectively work towards your team objectives. 

Take feedback and recognize what you can continue to improve. When your team sees that you are open to improvement, they will more likely take the same approach when you provide feedback to them. 

Some common areas you can look at to help you learn what’s going well include evaluating reporting, communicating with your team, and consulting a mentor you trust. Figure out how your reporting can lead to actionable insights. Take a look at the tools you are using and what can be improved to help your team do their job more efficiently. Communicate with your team often and ask them what’s working best for them. Figure out what areas can be improved and problem-solve together. Of course, having a mentor you trust can be effective because they have an outside lens to what is happening. They may be able to speak candidly with you about what areas of improvement are most important. 

Leadership isn’t always easy, but it can be extremely rewarding. Taking these leadership skills for multifamily into account, your team and communities will continue to flourish and grow. 
Standing confident in your leadership will allow you to gain the respect of your peers, team, prospects, and residents. Not only that but knowing your expectations for yourself and those around you will help you maintain structure and strong relationships. Encouraging communication will allow you to have a finger on the pulse of what’s going on in your community internally and externally. Tackling conflict resolution head-on will help create a stable environment for those around you. Lastly, continuing the learning process will allow you to grow in ways you never thought possible. Learn more about how to grow as a leader and avoid burnout in your day to day.

Automation for Pre-Leasing

How Automation Can Help You Pre-Lease Your Community

Managing a lease-up community is hectic. There are a myriad of things to do to prepare and marketing a community becomes a daunting task. But not everything needed to lease up the community has to be stressful. Setting up automation strategies can help you pre-lease your new community. 

Engage with Automation

Using automation at your lease-up community can engage prospective residents from the moment they look your property up on the internet. Using automation like a chatbot, you can reach customers anywhere they can find you, like social media, property websites, landing pages, ILS accounts, and more. As you begin to claim your listings, having a bot can help field the traffic that comes through and share the most qualified leads with your on-site team. 

Nurture During Pre-Leasing

Automation can help you nurture leads at your new community. Your on-site team is inundated with things to prepare the property. They are fielding tasks that are not typical on an established property. That’s where lead nurturing comes in. It’s common for lease-ups to see several people who want to see what’s new and aren’t genuinely qualified or interested. Having a nurture solution can help weed out those prospects that may not be serious about leasing and have your site teams working with those most likely to lease. 

Save Time For Your Teams

When pre-leasing a community, many marketing teams may set up a splash page to get a list started. It may not have all the information that an entire website would have, but basic information to get interested in the property. With minimal details, prospects may be prone to asking more questions because they seek answers they can’t find online. Using an automation solution with chat technology may help save time by answering those questions for you. While your chatbot solution answers questions, it may also nurture those leads, set appointments, and even begin the leasing process for you. On average, BetterBot customers see 100+ hours saved per property when using the complete solution. That’s some vital time that could be allotted to more critical tasks. 

When it comes down to it, automation can help assist communities of all types. However, it becomes imperative at a lease-up community because teams often work with a leaner staff and higher traffic volumes. Your teams can work efficiently using the available tools while providing the top service expected at a new community. Check out some of the ways that automation can help short-staffed leasing teams

FAQs-Bot-Performance

3 Reasons Why Utilizing FAQs Improves Bot Performance

FAQs, aka Frequently Asked Questions, are imperative to a successful bot performance. Addressing questions that are commonly asked in the early stages of the renter’s journey can make a significant difference. Furthermore, FAQs are something that can be utilized within your bot experience, at least when you use BetterBot’s automation solution. Here are three reasons why this feature is an important one to take advantage of.

Engagement

Engagement is the top reason why it’s so important to use FAQs. Having FAQs embedded within your bot experience naturally causes prospects to spend more time within the bot. The more time they spend, the more information prospects acquire. The more information they have, the more serious they will be when deciding. Engaging customers in the earliest stages is important because it can lead them through the decision-making process, which causes the most qualified leads to be pushed through to the community — and it all starts with engagement. 

Customer Satisfaction

Customers love information upfront. They don’t want to become a detective to find the necessary information. Most prospects want to find the preliminary information on their own rather than having to talk to someone. Taking advantage of FAQs within the chatbot experience allows customers to easily find answers to what they need, causing them to be more satisfied with the experience. 

Time-Saved

Taking advantage of an FAQ page reduces incoming questions, which saves your time valuable time and increases customer service. No longer is your leasing team answering the same question over and over. Instead, many prospective customers already have the answers before they even walk through the leasing office doors. Plus, as we mentioned earlier, FAQs help unqualified leads eliminate themselves, which means your team is also saving time by only working with the most serious prospects.

Ultimately, taking advantage of your property’s FAQ section can bring some amazing benefits. When FAQ sections are embedded within the bot it creates an even more seamless experience. Find out more about best practices and what other features can be embedded within your bot

Avoid Burnout in Multifamily

How To Avoid Burnout In Multifamily

We’ve all seen it — the monumental labor shortage. So many industries are experiencing burnout throughout their employment base, and property management is no different. We often hear that term, but do we truly know what it means?

According to Thrive Global, burnout is “a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.” They also define corporate burnout as exhaustion “due to stress from working with people under difficult or demanding conditions.”

So how do you avoid burnout in multifamily specifically? 

Set Healthy Work Boundaries

So many of us have difficulty saying no or having boundaries regarding our work. Setting boundaries doesn’t mean you are lazy or too weak to do the job. It means being self-aware enough to know what’s healthy for you.

When you have healthy boundaries, you are less likely to reach the point of burnout. What about real estate burnout? Here are a few examples of what that might look like in multifamily:

  • Not taking any work calls after hours whenever possible (If you need help with this one, see our article on ways leasing teams can serve prospects after hours, with no work on their part).
  • Consistency with breaks throughout the day.
  • Delegating tasks when feeling overwhelmed can be simple tasks like engaging on social media or opening up a model unit for the day. 
  • Setting definitive start and end times. 
  • Defining specific focus blocks of time.

Create Goals and Evaluate Often

It seems counterintuitive, but creating goals can help avoid burnout. That is if you are evaluating them consistently. It’s important to reexamine your goals quarterly at a minimum.

Ideally, you should create short-term and long-term personal and professional goals. Reaching your goals can create a sense of accomplishment, which then creates purpose and helps avoid the feelings of distress that come with burnout. 

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is vital — but what does it mean? This term gets used often in regards to meditation and movement. For this, we are referencing mindfulness as a state of being aware.

For example, if you are overwhelmed with the number of leads coming in or the number of appointments, you can practice mindfulness by acknowledging that feeling and writing it down.

Come back to it when you are less overwhelmed and figure out a solution for moving forward. It may even help to brainstorm with other team members about potential solutions (Note: If you are struggling with this particular issue, BetterBot’s AI leasing assistant can help).

Another example may be practicing mindfulness when working with team members and customers. You may find yourself getting frustrated or overwhelmed. Take notice of those feelings and ask yourself why you feel this way. Is there something that can be done in the future to help it? It may also be helpful to practice deep breathing to calm your mind at the moment.

According to everyonesocial, 52% of workers are feeling burnout. We don’t want to lose good talent, and we also don’t want to feel overwhelmed ourselves. Applying these tips to your routine and sharing them with your team can help turn things around.

Learn more about BetterBot’s multifamily lead nurturing platform or share this article with someone who needs to see it today! 

Onsite Marketing

Ways Multifamily Leasing Teams Can Contribute To Marketing Efforts

Let’s face it; onsite multifamily leasing teams are constantly busy. They consistently have prospects and residents at their offices, applications to process, and apartments to tour. Now we want to throw marketing into the mix, too?

Here are some simple ways on-site teams can contribute to marketing their communities with little effort. 

Social Engagement 

This one is pretty obvious. Sure, corporate teams can market for communities, but the posts that always do the best are the ones curated by the property directly. That’s because they are where the action is happening and can post in real time.

If your onsite marketing team is short on time, just coming up with the content can be helpful. Snap a quick photo of your resident event, or film a quick video of your model unit as you set up for the day. Sharing this content with your marketing team can help show prospects and residents that their community cares. 

Creating Moments of Connection

Speaking of showing you care, the second tip is to create moments of connection. What does this have to do with marketing? When prospects and residents feel cared for, they are more likely to recommend your community to their friends. They are also more likely to leave a positive review online when asked.

Nowadays, reviews are vital to communities and affect the traffic received. Sprout Marketing shares a great article on how to get resident testimonials, which can positively impact the way your communities are viewed and attract more of the residents you’re looking for. 

Leveraging Technology

One way teams can help is by leveraging technology whenever possible. Automating low-stakes processes allows the on-site team to focus on the more involved portions of the job. For example, BetterBot’s multifamily automation solution saves an average of 100+ hours (per property, each month), allowing team members to focus on more critical tasks.

Let’s be very clear: technology will never replace humans. It simply creates efficiencies of marketing scale while reducing repetitive tasks that humans either don’t do, doesn’t like to do, or don’t do very well.

Humans will always be needed to handle interactions that require thought, empathy and complexity. So let’s let humans be humans and utilize automation and technology to do the rest. Check out our article on Solving The Onsite Labor Shortages In Multifamily Through Technology to learn more about this topic. 

In conclusion, we know how busy onsite marketing teams get. This is why we must be mindful of what we ask our teams to do. Marketing your community is crucial, but there are some small yet impactful ways to get the onsite marketing team involved.

Implement these everyday habits into your marketing strategy for maximum results, and learn more about BetterBot’s automatic leasing platform for more.

Girl looking at laptop

Generate Better Leads By Using Automation On Your Website

Automation is one of the best tools to work with leads on your property website. Instead of producing more leads, it’s crucial to consider the importance of better leads. Automation can mean several different things. Ultimately, automating a process allows technology to take the wheel and handle more menial tasks, so that team members have more time to focus on more complex duties. Automation can come in many forms, including chatbots and lead nurturing.

The Challenge

When people visit websites, they are faced with unnecessary contact forms popping up out every corner, invitations to chat with a live person, or suggestions to subscribe to a newsletter. The reality is that these customer engagement methods rarely provide decent results and can often have adverse effects on customer satisfaction scores. Cost can also be a huge problem, especially in the case of automation. You spend a big chunk of your marketing budget to bring visitors to your website only to see “agent is not available” when trying a live chat.

Ways Automation Can Help

Automation, such as chatbots or lead nurturing can effectively solve many of these problems. Automation can help brands better engage with website visitors who are more willing to share their information. Here are more potential benefits that you can expect by utilizing automation on your website:

  • Help visitors in real-time, no waiting for an agent and no time gaps between agent responses.
  • Engage with visitors 24 hours a day.
  • Focus your live agent on higher-value activities while offloading menial tasks to your chatbot.
  • Offer a consistent experience in multiple channels like Facebook, SMS, and Web.
  • Your chatbot can provide real value that will encourage visitors to share more information.
  • Chat transcripts can be forwarded to live agents for a seamless handoff.
  • Sentiment analysis can measure how visitors feel about your brand message.

How Automation Provides Better Leads

When automation jumps into the equation, there are endless possibilities. One of the results of deploying this type of technology is better leads. For instance, using automation through chatbots allows prospects to gain basic information about the community, which means the most interested leads will move forward to the next step in the leasing journey. Another example would be lead nurturing. When lead nurturing is automated, it allows properties to connect with their customer while putting in minimal effort. It will enable the prospect to continue the conversation and move forward when they are ready. 

All in all, we know that humans will never be extinct in the workforce. Technology will not replace humans, but it is there to help them. That’s where automation comes into play. Automating processes that are time-consuming and don’t require much effort allows teams to focus their time and energy where it matters most, resulting in more leases. Click here to set up your automation tools today.

Putting Together A Tech Stack That Makes Sense For Your Business

In today’s world, there are so many different technology options. It can be overwhelming. That’s why it’s so important to find the right stack of technologies that make sense for your communities. When evaluating what technologies make the most sense, it’s essential to consider the following types of systems: 

  • Prospect Management Tools
  • Resident Focused Tech
  • Team Support Technologies

Prospect Management Tools 

Obtaining and converting prospects into residents can be a lot of work. This is why you need to have some sort of prospect management tools to help with the process. A few of the tools that are essential in this department include: 

  • Chatbot Technology — Help prospects get information all in one place. For example, BetterBot’s chatbot offers a place for prospective renters to find information where they want, when they want, and how they want. The bot is not only able to be seen on the property website, but it can go anywhere renters are looking, including social media, ILS pages, and so much more. The bot helps relay the most important insights about the community, which weeds out the unqualified leads. 
  • Self-Guided Tour Tech — Post COVID-19, more and more renters desire a self-guided interaction when it comes to touring their potential home. Self-guided tour technology allows them to set up their tour on their terms and feel safe knowing that they will have more control over their touring experience. 
  • Lead Management Tools — In addition to offering chatbot technology, BetterBot offers some great lead management tools. Using BetterBot for Leads, prospects are intercepted and nurtured in ways that are more likely to result in a scheduled tour. 
  • Marketing Tools — How are your prospects finding you? This is a loaded question. Marketing tools make it easier for your prospects to find you. This term, Marketing Tools, may sound broad but what we mean by this are tools that make it easier for prospective residents to learn about your community. This may mean using Google AdWords, Facebook Marketplace, ILS listings, or even geofencing services. You can use these tools to help attract your customers and get the word out about your communities. 

Resident Focused Tech

It’s essential to leverage technology that focuses on your current residents. While gaining new prospects is great, it costs more to gain a new resident than keeping existing ones. This is why it’s so important to invest in tools that will help you retain your residents, such as: 

  • Automation Tools — Make it easy for residents to find information on your community website. Automation tools such as BetterBot can help residents find their portal to complete any order of business like paying rent or submitting a service request. 
  • CRM — Customer relationship management tools are essential to help your team keep track of crucial information. You want to make sure you have a quality CRM that maximizes every resident touchpoint. One tool that has seen great success is Rent Dynamics CRM function. Their tools offer an easy way to manage residents while still maintaining a personal touch. 
  • Resident Engagement Tools — Engaging the resident post-move-in can sound like a daunting task for property management teams. Teams have to get new residents lined up, but they also have to foster the relationship? It sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Investing in resident engagement tools can help bridge the gap so that current residents stay interested and involved. Tools such as Updater, hOp, and RentPlus allow residents the opportunity to interact with the community with little effort on the team’s part. 

Team Support Technologies 

Finding technology that helps your property management team save time is imperative. It seems like the list of things to do just keeps on getting longer, and teams are becoming overwhelmed. That’s why it’s essential to find tools to support those teams, including: 

  • Time-Saving Tech — Invest in technology that will help save your team time. For example, BetterBot saves teams an average of 57 hours per month, per property, by helping provide information upfront to prospects and residents. It also saves time by providing the most qualified prospects so that teams have time to focus on what’s important. 
  • Reputation Management Tools — Online reputation is one of the first things prospects see when they find you online. That’s why it’s so important to have a reputation management tool that helps monitor and respond to online reviews. This also allows teams to learn what they can improve to make the resident experience an enjoyable one. 
  • Reporting — Being able to measure results will help your teams make better decisions regarding staffing, budgeting, and planning. When looking at your tech stack, be sure to find out which tools offer reporting so that your teams can be informed about how they are performing. 

Putting together a tech stack for your communities sounds stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. When you remember to look for suitable tools, it can become liberating knowing that your teams, residents, and prospects are all taken care of. For more information on putting together a tech stack, check out our resource covering ways to know a tool is worth using

Put Down the Wide Brush – Why You Should Tailor Your Chatbot to Your Unique Property Type

Under the multifamily umbrella, there are various property types – and no two properties are the same. And while innovations in proptech have made it much easier for property management teams to do everything from schedule tours to convert leads into new renters, no technology is a one-size-fits-all solution. Especially in the case of a multifamily chatbot, we’ve found that the more you can personalize and tailor your bot to your unique property type, the more effective it will be in the long term.

In this quick resource, we’ll outline both the benefits of tailoring your multifamily bot and how to go about it with specific examples.

Why tailoring your multifamily chatbot is important

More qualified leads

A great chatbot can help you insert yourself in conversations when and where it matters most. Still, a generic property chatbot can only help you get so far. Tailoring your chatbot to fit your property’s unique type and renter requirements can help you secure even more qualified leads and tours.

Meet your prospective renters where they are

Depending on your property type, prospective renters may be on the hunt for specific amenities and features. For example, students looking for housing may be interested in knowing how many beds an available room has. Customizing your bot to feature this and other relevant information can make it much easier to meet prospective leads’ needs directly without going back and forth with a property management team.

Give your team valuable time back

When your chatbot can more effectively meet people’s needs and provide relevant information, it can save your property management team valuable time. Instead of fielding endless email and phone queries, any information a person needs can be quickly obtained through your custom chatbot.

How to tailor your bot to common property types

Student

The apartment rental process can be unique for students, which is why it’s a great idea to craft a chatbot solution that can meet their needs. A few ways to tailor your bot for the student housing experience include:

Allowing students to search by unit availability: With many looking for apartments at the beginning and end of semesters, it can be helpful to search by availability at the touch of a button.

Search by the number of beds: Many students will opt to live with roommates to minimize the amount spent on rent. Your chatbot should be searchable by number of beds, not only to help your prospects find the right space but to help your property management team stay organized.

Student scheduling: The school year can look different based on the type of school and location. Our student bot offers a custom scheduling tool to schedule by semester, trimester, or quarter calendar.

Access to student resources: Providing interactive student resources is a great way to help your renters stay up-to-date with what’s going on at their building and school.

Conventional

Looking to spruce up your apartment chatbot? Here are a few of our recommendations:

Add multilingual support: Don’t leave great leads hanging just because English isn’t their first language. BetterBot offers multilingual support so you can easily communicate with all your prospects.

Offer virtual tours/videos: Although we’re a far cry from the beginning of the pandemic, many prospective renters may feel more comfortable taking a virtual tour of your property. With BetterBot, you can easily embed your virtual tours from Matterport, LCP360, Zillow, Vimeo, Helix, Realync, YouTube, and more.

Embed your photo galleries: Instead of sending users away from your chatbot to check out your fantastic pool and tennis court, you can quickly embed all the galleries you want directly into your chatbot.

Affordable

Especially in affordable/section 8 housing, it can be challenging for property management teams to keep up with the volume of leads and daily requests for information. A personalized chatbot can help make your life much easier by offering the following:

Waitlist management: With a user-friendly dashboard, our Affordable Bot makes it simple to view your waitlist at a glance. And once a renter moves out, you can easily choose the next – no physical list needed.

Affordable-specific dialogue: For example, you can pre-qualify leads by asking for yearly income and the number of residents looking to move in. This can help prospective renters know quickly and easily whether or not they qualify to move into your affordable spaces before even speaking with your team.

Affordable-specific reporting: Even at an affordable property, it’s still crucial that your team can sell your property experience. Our affordable-specific dashboard allows your team to quickly assess top-of-funnel leasing performance, helping you determine what’s working – and what isn’t.

Lease-Up

A Lease-Up specific bot can be beneficial for communities that may be so new that they don’t have a website up and running yet.

Offer community-specific information: Your bot will be the first (and likely only) place people go to learn about your upcoming community. Make sure to customize it with plenty of relevant information, including info on parking, amenities, and whether or not your facilities will be pet-friendly.

Set up tour appointments: Just because you don’t have a site yet doesn’t mean you can’t start booking tour appointments. Set up and manage tour appointments directly from your bot from the get-go.

In almost every industry today, personalization and customization reign supreme. And it’s not just about better serving your leads and renters – it’s also about helping make your teams’ life easier too. With the right chatbot solution at their fingertips, property management teams can feel empowered to spend less time on repetitive, low-value workflows. For more chatbot guides and insights into multifamily industry trends, check out the BetterBot Blog.

Ethical Considerations AI Companies in the Multifamily Industry Need to Keep Top-Of-Mind

Artificial intelligence and other related tech like machine learning have had an incredible impact on the real estate industry as a whole. While historically slow to adopt new practices and technologies, the past 5-10 years have represented the beginning of a new era for the space. Especially in the multifamily sector, AI has a tremendous potential that’s only starting to be realized by certain enterprising companies. However, with any technology (new or old) comes a series of considerations that need to be taken into account. 

When implemented in the right ways, AI can be an incredible tool for both property management teams and renters alike. At the same time, it can also perpetuate harmful biases and compromise people’s data and security if the proper safeguards aren’t put in place. Today we’re going to take a closer look at a few of the most important factors AI companies in multifamily should consider before, during, and after developing new applications for this tech.

5 top considerations for AI companies in multifamily 

Privacy 

Data makes the (tech) world go ‘round. And as such, it’s one of the most valuable assets a company can have when developing a new AI product. Better data can improve an algorithm’s performance, and even expand its capabilities. However, the way data has historically been collected and managed has increasingly come under more scrutiny by consumers. Fortunately, developers are listening to these concerns, with 82% of developers saying that ethical concerns are now much more of a consideration than before. 

The crux of data privacy revolves around companies asking themselves what they should do, instead of what they can do with the data they have at their disposal. In the multifamily space, this could look like protecting renter information instead of selling it to third parties, and only collecting data with people’s explicit consent.  

Security

Keeping people’s information private is one thing, but being able to protect that information from cybersecurity threats is a whole other ball game. You can have the most revolutionary AI product, but if you don’t have sound security infrastructure around that product and your operations, the data you’ve worked so hard to collect ethically could easily be stolen. This is not just a matter of privacy ethics, but trust as well. Once your company has been subject to a cyberattack or data leak, it will be much harder for property management groups and consumers to trust using your product. 

Accountability

If there’s ever a question of ethics, who should a developer turn to? Creating a clear hierarchy or structure for where/how/to whom concerns should be raised is essential to building applications that ultimately adhere to compliance regulations and best practices. What’s more, establishing this culture of accountability and responsibility early on can help cement better practices as a non-negotiable aspect of your company in the long-term. Oftentimes, it’s a lack of institutional accountability – not a single developer – that’s responsible for an AI product failing to meet certain ethical standards.  

Biases

A big topic of discussion in the tech world today is centered around our own internal biases and how we can unconsciously instill those biases into AI if we’re not careful. In real estate, things like racial biases have a long, painful history of exclusion, and in order to stop perpetuating that history, companies need to intentionally craft algorithms and systems that aren’t shaped by unconscious biases. How can teams go about doing this? There are several ways to reduce bias within AI, including: 

  • Understand your training data: Sometimes commercial and academic data sets include labeling systems that can bring bias into your algorithm. When choosing training data, make sure to take into account the full spectrum of your intended user-base and use-cases. 
  • Diversify your teams: Including a diverse array of experiences and perspectives on your team will help you engage with your product in different ways. And with people asking questions that you might not have thought of, you might be able to catch potential issues before they arise – or expand your algorithm’s capabilities in a way you hadn’t thought of.
  • Making testing and feedback routine: The easier you can make it to provide feedback, the quicker you’ll be able to take action. The goal for these products should be to evolve and get better with time and feedback, so build consistent testing and feedback sessions into your process.

Approaching AI in multifamily from a place of sensitivity and curiosity when it comes to ethics is key to building a better future for this tech in the industry. Want more up-to-date multifamily resources and news? The BetterBot blog has got you covered. 

Ways to Promote Your Pet-Friendly Community

Renters all around the United States are looking for pet-friendly apartments. An American Apartment Owner Association study had shown that 90% of renters stated that they have a pet. This study also revealed that 30% of those pet owners looked for apartments around pet amenities such as dog parks, walking trails, and veterinary offices.

“Millions of renters from around the country are in need of pet-friendly apartments. In 2008, more than 11 million searches for apartments that allow cats and dogs were conducted on Apartments.com” (National Survey REVEALS Renters Are Living for Their Pets).

More and more potential renters depend on property websites to obtain all the information they need to make a property decision. Below are three ways you can ensure that your property is on the top contender’s list.

  1. Ensure that pet information is accessible to potential renters on your website

You can do this in various ways. A few examples of making your pet information more accessible is putting a snapshot of the information in a banner on your home page.

This banner can be a still image or turned into a carousel that gives more details as the following images are displayed.

Another way to display this information is by placing a call to action. This CTA, call-to-action, can be placed in a body of text or a picture. This CTA will direct potential renters to a landing page with all the pet information they need.

Lastly, you can always add “pet policy” in your header menu on your website to give potential renters a quick and easy way to find the information they need.

2. Update your ILS platforms

In 2019, a survey was conducted called Renter Insight & Digital Engagement survey by apartment seekers to identify struggling points in apartment searching. The study results identified the following “The most frustrating issues for apartment seekers, according to the survey, included “finding accurate information online about the property” at 31%” (Salmonsen, M.)

While it is essential to have your most updated pet information on your website, many property owners forget about ILS platforms. With more than 80% of apartment seekers looking for their next apartment on ILS platforms, property owners must continuously update these platforms to ensure potential renters have the most accurate information.

3. Outreach Marketing

A good way for the property to get pet information to potential renters is by partnering with local pet shops. Property managers can contact local pet shops and see if they would be interested in establishing a partnership where the property manager can give the pet shop advertising material that they can provide to customers. In return, they can advertise the pet shop on the property or during property events.

Pet-friendly properties are becoming more attractive to potential renters even the ones that don’t have a furry friend yet. Don’t miss out on potential renters due to a lack of information on your website or your ILS. Creating an amazing apartment searching experience is how to ensure that renters call your property their forever home.

Work Citation:

“National Survey REVEALS Renters Are Living for Their Pets.” AAOA, 29 Jan. 2021, www.american-apartment-owners-association.org/property-management/latest-news/what-90-of-renters-want/.

Salmonsen, M. (2019, July 12). A vast majority of U.S. RENTERS use online ratings and reviews in the apartment search. Multifamily Executive. Retrieved September 27, 2021, from https://www.multifamilyexecutive.com/property-management/a-vast-majority-of-u-s-renters-use-online-ratings-and-reviews-in-apartment-search_o.

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