Apartment Marketers Embrace Mobile Forty Years After First Cell Phone Call

Forty years ago this week, the first public cell phone call was made by Motorola engineer Marty Cooper, who used the opportunity to call the head of Motorola’s rival, Bell Labs. A lot has changed in multifamily marketing over the last four decades (and in the forty two years since we were founded by  Fred and Sid Goodman!), but MRI Software continues to adapt to the highly dynamic real estate market by delivering leading software solutions for property managers, accountants and marketers. In honor of the fortieth birthday of the cell phone, we’re sharing some mobile marketing best practices that will benefit multifamily property managers.

Mobile Websites

According to Nielson, mobile phone usage has reached critical mass world-wide, with smartphone users making up the majority of mobile consumers in the US, surpassing the 50% mark in March 2012. Certainly smartphone usage among apartment hunters in most markets matches this statistic and usage may be even higher in larger metro areas. According to Zillow,55% of their overall traffic now comes from a mobile device. Interestingly, 60% of weekend traffic to Zillow originates from a mobile device. With Zillow reporting 89 homes being viewed on Zillow Mobile per second, having a robust and elegant mobile website solution for your properties is critical. You wouldn’t ignore one out of every two prospective residents that walk through your leasing office doors. Are you ignoring half of your online rental prospects? If you answered “yes” to that, don’t worry – VaultWare Mobile Websites can help.

Mobile Reservations

So you have a mobile optimized website, but is it reservation friendly? Can your mobile apartment hunters take action to reserve a specific available apartment conveniently from their mobile device? When a prospective renter can not easily view current details about your property on their smartphone or tablet they are less likely to take action to become a resident while their interest is piqued. Don’t force mobile apartment hunters to move on to your competitors because they couldn’t find the information they need in order to make the decision to rent from you.

Ensure your reservation process is mobile optimized and does not frustrate prospects by forcing them to scroll and zoom to try to get the site in just the right position for the information. Make it easy on yourself and your team by implementing VaultWare Mobile Websites with the VaultWare Mobile Reservation System. Although many properties and management companies already have a mobile website solution in place, it’s likely that it does not have the reservation capability built in. With the enhanced functionality that adding VaultWare Mobile Unit Availability (UA) links to your non-VaultWare mobile websites brings, prospects can now request to hold and even pre-qualify online with minimal involvement from your leasing staff.

With over forty years of experience delivering real estate property management and accounting solutions, we at MRI Software understand the challenges our customers deal with on a daily basis. Our suite of best-of-breed customer relationship management solutions for the multifamily property management industry is designed to serve the unique and ever-changing needs of apartment owners and managers, just as the mobile phone has done for the everyday user.