Entrata Blog

What changes need to be made to ensure everyone has access to, quality housing at a price they can afford In recent years, population growth in urban areas has far exceeded multifamily housing development, leading to rising rents and a shortage of affordable housing. Because of this, affordable housing has been a hot topic among citizens and politicians alike, but there is a lot of confusion in this area as to what constitutes affordable housing as opposed to housing affordability.

Most properties have some sort of screening process to check out an applicant’s credit rating and/or rental history before allowing them to sign a lease. It’s a sad fact that it’s often better to identify and avoid a bad resident in the first place rather than try to remove one after they’ve already moved in.

In the past, waiting a week to see if you qualified for an apartment was part of the territory for an applicant. But so was the inability to track the progress of a package shipment, or the need to wait for the rerun of your favorite show if you missed the original broadcast.

Entrata recently hosted a webinar featuring experts in training and onboarding in the multifamily industry, Hyrum Balzer, Director of Product Education and Lauren Chandler, Manager of Elite Certifications, about the importance of training in creating a culture of growth. Below are some of the key takeaways from the webinar.

In our latest Resident Experts Series, we sat down with Lia Nichole Smith, Senior Vice President of Education and Performance at SatisFacts, to discuss how multifamily businesses should approach interactions with Gen Z as more and more of them enter the rental pool. The following are a few of the key takeaways from our conversation.

We live in a data-rich world. Any PM software platform you use is going to offer lists of reports to find metrics on every aspect of your business. All of this data can offer a trove of information, but how much real insight does it provide?

In our latest Resident Experts Series, we sat down with Dana Pate, founder and CEO of Stitch Marketing, a consulting firm tailor-made to serve the rental housing industry to discuss how multifamily businesses should approach branding and what they can do to build a strong brand that resonates with their target audience. The following are a few of the key takeaways from our conversation.

Property Solutions recently targeted a number of our clients for an intensive study on the processes surrounding lease signing and renewals. The responses indicate that, while the multifamily industry is embracing technology more and more in their marketing and resident retention efforts, many use the same labor and paper-intensive practices for lease execution and renewals that they were using decades ago. Here’s what we found:

Centralization isn’t one-size-fits-all. Property management companies are looking to centralize their business through new workflows, consolidating processes, shifting organization structures, etc for a variety of reasons. These include reasons like:

Property managers unanimously agree that online rent payments are the way to go. The time saved processing payments can save a manager an average of $5 per online payment. So now that you’ve made it available for residents to pay their rent online, how do you get them to actually do it? Here are a few ideas:

Deconstructing consumer behavior really comes down to one thing – perception of value. Unfortunately, that one thing is more complicated than it sounds. There are an endless number of perceptions from a seemingly endless variety of prospective renters and residents. That’s why apartment owner/operators who navigate the consumer behavior maze most effectively and efficiently win residents at higher rents and for longer lease terms than their competitors.

Ask anyone who works in multifamily about the challenges facing the industry, and you won’t have to wait long for the topic of soaring property insurance costs to come up.