Karen Kossow

Genius at Work

By Geneva Ives on Jul 29, 2015 in People

Community Realty Company is a leader in property management, leasing, and asset management for income producing properties in the Washington D.C. area and beyond, enhancing values for owner-investors and known for providing an exceptional tenant experience.

We recently enjoyed an interview with Karen Kossow, Community Realty Company’s Vice President of Marketing. She talked about industry trends that are changing the way multifamily does business and shared her advice for other apartment marketers.

Whether you’re an experienced pro or just getting your feet wet, we’re sure you’re going to learn something from Karen, that’s why we recently selected her to be our newest RentCafe Marketing Genius.

How long have you worked in multifamily?

Kossow: This is my 25^th year in the industry. I started out as an activities director immediately after college and just kind of fell in love with multifamily. It gets under your skin.

As the VP of Marketing, where do you find that you spend the majority of your time?

Kossow: We are small. We don’t have an internal IT group. RentCafe has become such an important piece of our marketing; I spend time getting our teams trained and to buy into it. Beyond that, a lot of my week is spent analyzing results. What’s working on our websites and what’s working in the industry in general.

What do you see happening in the industry right now?

Kossow: We’ve heard all about the Millennials for the past five years. But to me, one of the biggest trends is really having to touch more demographics at one time than we ever have before. The Boomers are also coming in, and they’re looking for a lot of the same things the Millennials are… and they have the money to pay for it.

Although the Boomers and Millennials want similar amenities, they search for apartments differently, using media in different ways. So we have to use more marketing channels today than we did in the past. And we have to make sure we’re using them appropriately to reach all the different kinds of renters.

So you’re seeing a different mix of renters today than when you first started?

Kossow: Yes, at one of our lease up properties 39% of our renters to date have sold a home to move in with us.

What are your thoughts on online ratings and reviews? Good, bad, or necessary evil?

Kossow: Definitely good for converting prospects. We put our reviews right on our websites for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it keeps visitors on your site, instead of sending them to find reviews on outside sites. For another, building changing content into the site is good for SEO.

How do you solicit reviews from your residents?

Kossow: We use the email tool within RentCafe to solicit reviews that we add to our sites. Then we take it a step further and make video testimonials that we embed into our landing pages. When you hit one of our property sites, within seconds you’re hearing residents talk about their experience (see it in action here). Prospects are automatically hearing something positive as soon as they find us. We’ve had people come to the property and specifically mention the impact of the videos. It’s definitely impacting our results.

Why RentCafe? Why Yardi?

Kossow: Having everything on one platform allows us to be more aggressive. Yardi really cares about our industry and our needs. Working with the team has been a hugely collaborative process. Sometimes it seems like anything we think of, voila it’s done! RentCafe’s capabilities evolve to match our requests. It’s always getting better, which is great.

So is your day-to-day all marketing, all the time?

Kossow: At work, yes, but outside of work you will find me tackling more physical challenges, including a recent surf camp I attended in North Carolina where I got my first nosebleed ever!

Minutes after wrapping up our chat, Kossow dashed off to catch a Pat Benatar concert. We like to keep up with this ball of energy on Twitter. You can too, just click here.