With more and more renters glued to their smartphones, mobile Web access and apps are transforming the apartment industry.
Spurred by the smash success of Apple’s iPhone and a growing field of highly worthy competitor smartphones, mobile Internet usage continues to surge. Renters and apartment seekers are no exception to this trend. Multifamily housing executives and property managers should be regularly reviewing the impact of mobile technology on their business and adjusting marketing and technology budgets accordingly.
Mobile growth and real-time accessibility enable today’s marketers to reach consumers during both peak and off-peak hours. Mobile technology offers the opportunity to employ both direct marketing to potential customers as well as consumer care and information sharing to pre-existing contacts. As such, mobile clearly creates two disparate opportunities for multifamily housing operators: Not only can apartment companies employ mobile strategies to display apartments for rent, potentially convert more prospects and capture more leads, but mobile can also be employed to directly engage and help retain current residents, collect rent and process service requests.
The Mobile Experience
When thinking about mobile and how to respond, it’s important to differentiate between mobile Web browsing and mobile apps. Mobile Web browsing involves various Web browsers typically tied to a particular phone’s operating system—Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s mobile IE are the three leaders. While it is technically possible to surf a PC website from a mobile phone, the user experience is, in most cases, terrible. In contrast, mobile websites are optimized for mobile browsers and, most importantly, for the much smaller screen sizes available on smartphones versus PC’s.
Mobile also includes apps (software applications) that are downloaded onto a smartphone. The diversity and popularity of apps for the iPhone have helped make it one of the most successful hardware product launches in history, but apps are also available on Google’s Android platform and, most recently, the Blackberry. Each of these smartphone platforms are built on different software, and it therefore requires distinct development efforts (and investments) to create an iPhone, Android and/or Blackberry app. Once a company creates an app, it also must budget for ongoing maintenance and upgrades.
While apps have helped spur the smartphone market, they are most popular in categories such as games or services where the consumer has a long-term interest in the content offered. Apartment seekers have a limited time horizon and, as such, are less likely to commit to downloading an app—even though they can simply choose to erase it when they’ve moved—than they are to search via their mobile Web browser.
The Apple iPad deserves special attention. Cumulative iPad purchases are expected to exceed 120 million units by the end of 2012, according to the research firm iSuppli. Many other manufacturers have introduced competitive tablet PC offerings. Most PC websites function fine on tablet PCs, though several of the largest real estate sites have now published iPad-specific apps to ensure a better user experience.
Building Website Traffic
How will mobile’s growth affect your business? If today you only have a PC website, start by looking at your Web analytics data and quantifying what percentage of your visitors are attempting to use your site while on a mobile device, and then measure how this activity has changed over time. One challenge, however, is that multifamily housing companies without mobile sites risk being caught in a negative feedback loop; they have nothing to appeal to mobile users, so they see diminished mobile traffic.
The reality is that it’s possible to build or buy a mobile version of a website quite inexpensively. (Several multifamily specific vendors offer a mobile site for well under $50/month/property.) Having a mobile site may help owners hit both occupancy and retention goals in the years ahead.
The decision to invest in one or more mobile apps is more complex, and often more expensive. While mobile websites can be purchased on an inexpensive, ongoing license basis, app software development is typically an upfront expense, often in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, depending on features. Several industry observers feel that there’s a greater long-term opportunity in using apps for resident retention and servicing rather than for lead acquisition.
“There is a certain sexiness in having a mobile app,” says Donald Davidoff, Group VP of Strategic Systems at Archstone, an apartment investment and management company with 78,000 apartments in the United States and Europe. “However, coolness factor aside, mobile Web is a much more efficient way to reach residents across multiple mobile platforms.”
Apps are more appropriate for servicing and retaining residents than for generating leads because users must download an app. “Prospective residents would have to already find you to realize they want to download the app, so what’s the point in a search app?” he explains. “If they’re finding you for your app, you could more easily just let them search on your mobile website. In contrast, an existing resident has motivation to download a payments/ service request app because they’ll use it multiple times in the future.”
Resident Care and Retention
While, for some, apps may not yet be financially viable for lead generation, Archstone and other companies are entering the market with apps designed for resident service. In February, Archstone announced the release of its Android app, myArchstone. A follow-up to the company’s similar iPhone App, myArchstone is designed specifically to make apartment living easier. Archstone filled the app with convenient functionality that empowers residents to pay their rent, view their entire account history, submit and track service requests and contact community management from anywhere they have cell phone data service or a Wi-Fi connection.
“I’m very glad we did this,” Davidoff says. “The amount of usage has pleasantly surprised us all. In the first five months since we launched our iPhone app, we’ve collected several million dollars in rent and processed over 1,000 service requests.”
The industry’s ability to monitor consumers’ usage, as well as facilitate communication and bill payment, makes the future for mobile in multifamily look bright.
Mark Moran is Senior Vice President, Consumer Marketing and Business Development, for MyNewPlace, an ILS and supplier of marketing services such as mobile and PC website solutions and RentEngine, a Craigslist posting tool.