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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.