Kerry A. Sullivan 

Brent Sobol is no stranger to crime. He fights it on a daily basis at the 1,100 apartment units he owns and operates in the Atlanta area.

A recent Pew Research Center study released last week and based on newly released U.S. Census Bureau data shows that college enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds hit an all-time high one year ago--and is expected to have continued growing. Good news for student-housing providers, right? Not necessarily. A growing number of these students are opting to attend community colleges instead because they are less expensive and closer to home, which means no student housing for them.

The idea of using revenue-management programs to streamline business functions and generate funds is not a new one. But hiring someone to act as a liaison between software and staff--and incorporate feedback from Laramar’s property managers into the program--makes the Laramar Group uniquely successful.

You might recall a previous post about my friend whose apartment showed signs of mouse/mice presence, but whose management company didn't consider the issue a maintenance priority until my friend e-mailed the management firm's corporate president and copied both of her onsite community managers.

Speaking of augmented reality (AR) in a previous post, I'm now excited to report that apartment REIT UDR went live Sept. 14 with a AR layer specifically geared toward renters.

What's one better than a prospect viewing apartment listings via a smartphone mobile application while walking down the street? How about pointing a phone down a street, scanning its camera viewfinder past buildings and receiving information about available apartments within blocks of where the prospect is?

How does your apartment community deal with work orders and service requests? Here's the real-life horror story, told by one of my renter friends, and how she finally got management to take her apartment’s mouse issue seriously.

Craigslist, a mass of classified ads for everything from jobs to dates to furniture, has a love/hate relationship with apartment seekers and apartment providers alike.

Many forward-thinking decision-makers in the apartment industry are paying closer attention to mobile apps, believing such technology is what their customers want and need in their search for apartments.

Are any of you maintaining Twitter accounts for individual apartment communities as a means of marketing? If so, there is something you should know: Teens (and young people up through age 24) don't tweet, according to an Aug. 5 Mashable article.

Smartphone applications are lifesavers for apartment residents and owners alike — they can locate the nearest Chinese restaurant when you don't want to cook, help you pass the time with Tetris, find out what's happening in local entertainment over the weekend... and tell you if there are any sex offenders in your neighborhood?

You've heard of people with magnetic personalities. For whatever reason, others gravitate toward these types of people. But have you heard of magnetic states -- namely, states in which a high share of the adults who live there now moved there from another state? More importantly, do you have an apartment-community presence in these popular states?

One thing's for sure: it's not your new-to-the-job-market Generation Y residents. Thirty-five percent of the under-30 crowd has trouble paying rent or mortgage or have faced job losses in their households, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

Reports stating that the United States' growing Hispanic population cannot be ignored are not new. But did you know that one out of every 10 people born in Mexico is currently living in the United States? How have you altered marketing efforts to appeal to this particular immigrant population -- and immigrants in general?

Are your online marketing efforts age- or demographic-specific? Are your text messages and mobile alerts lost on a prospective resident base that only accesses the Internet from a work or home stationary computer -- if at all? The Pew Research Center recently released a survey that finds that although Americans sure love surfing the World Wide Web, a surprising 61 percent of them have not made the leap to mobile communication and information technology.

Whether accessed by PDA or cell phone, laptop or desktop, Laramar Group's Red Road Commons' Web site is interactive to every prospect that views it, thanks to a messaging platform that integrates mobile Web with short messaging service (SMS) technology.