For the loved ones of residents in senior living, concerns about the coronavirus have not yet abated, even as states reopen and life gradually returns to “normal.” Residents in communities are at a higher risk for COVID, and restrictions on visits remain in place to protect them. So it’s not hard to see why family members would want transparency from senior living providers. Has anyone there caught it? What protocols are in place to help? How is everyone holding up? Since the start of the outbreak, dozens of states have instituted reporting guidelines that require assisted living and skilled nursing facilities to report their COVID numbers to public health authorities. But some states have gone even further by asking providers to share those same numbers with the family members directly on a daily basis. Of course, many providers have already taken great steps to expand their communications. They’ve added FAQs to their website, posted notices to their online resident portal, and have sent plenty of emails to loved ones, residents, staff and vendors. At Yardi, we’ve had clients reach out for help setting up email campaigns like these, so we’ve put together a quick tutorial video that covers how you can create emails that can be sent in bulk to a customized list of contacts. Senior living email correspondence in Yardi Both Yardi Voyager Senior Housing and RENTCafé Senior CRM offer email correspondence. Whichever you choose to use, you can leverage templates to pull in information like the recipient’s first name, today’s date and facility name from your database. That way, you can easily customize your emails in bulk. The video will walk you through how you can choose your information categories, format your text and then filter your contact list. It also explains...

There are several factors that can influence a change in a property’s performance. The economy and market conditions are often the largest influences that are beyond your control. Smaller and more controllable factors, like vendor selection, may influence your success as well. If you haven’t evaluated your vendors’ performance since striking the contracts, now is the time. Complacency with vendors is bad business It’s common to find reputable vendors and stick with them until a major event prompts you to reconsider. The result is that the quality of vendor services may slowly and subtly change without your awareness. As the quality of services degrade, it negatively affects your property’s performance. Have resident complaints or dissatisfaction risen? Have you noticed units are harder to lease out? The overall maintenance of your site could be a contributing factor. Any work completed by vendors—landscaping, pool and site maintenance, turning and staging units, for example—are part of the prospects’ and residents’ experience. If vendor performance is underwhelming, your property suffers. Ask the three simple question below to determine if your vendors are truly an asset to your business. Are your vendors organized? Disorganized vendors rarely delivery top-notch services. A few common signs of disorganization include: arriving late to appointments delayed invoicing unclear and unspecific invoicing inconsistent performance or products and poor communication If your vendor demonstrates more than one of these signs, it may be worthwhile to take a closer look at their performance and business practices. Also, ensure that all licensing and insurance is updated each year. A lack of coverage is a risk to you and your customers. Besides, if they’re falling behind on essential documentation, what else are they overlooking? Learn how VendorCafe empowers your business to reduce risk, gain efficiency, and enhance compliance. Are...

Have you ever decided on purchasing a product online or going to a new restaurant as a direct result of an anonymous user’s review? As the popularity of various shopping or social platforms rises–such as Amazon or Yelp–so does the importance of online reviews. Studies show that at least 90 percent of people say that online reviews influence their purchase decisions, and at least 88% of people trust online reviews from strangers as much as personal recommendations. A study by the Harvard Business School found that positive reviews have a direct correlation with increased sales. For example, restaurants that boost their Yelp rating by one star see an increase in revenues anywhere between 5 to 9 percent. It is no surprise that businesses around the world are deciding to pour resources into obtaining more reviews for their products in hopes of generating more sales. Businesses increase the incentives for leaving reviews by using tactics such as giving set discount amounts in their customers’ purchase, or even providing credit that can be redeemed on their website for future use. In addition, online review companies such as SharedReviews or RateItAll operate like social networking websites, where users can rate items in various categories such as food, games, movies, and many other things. In return, users will receive a share of the revenue that the online review company earns. However, some studies show that paying users to leave reviews leads to a significant decrease in the number of reviews on their sites. According to a study done about a social shopping platform in China, after introducing a credit reward system in exchange for reviews, the number of reviews on the platform decreased by 30 percent. Why would that be? A possibility could be that customers with large...

Native marketing is a term that Gary Vaynerchuk made popular in his book, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.” The term describes how social media marketing must be customized for each platform. As you can imagine, becoming an expert on two or three platforms takes time and money, which are two resources that marketing departments rarely have in abundance. Yet if there is one lesson that you learn from native marketing, it should be that quality social media marketing requires time. There are no shortcuts. I’ve tried useless shortcuts myself. Scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite make it easy to create one post and splash it across multiple platforms. We save time and reach more people, right? We’re geniuses! Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Each platform is unique, which is why it can thrive in competition against the others. As distinct entities, they have their own languages and codes of conduct. You’ll rarely find success by copying and pasting content between your accounts. You’ve got to tailor it at least, and come up with completely different strategies at best. For example, Twitter and Instagram are havens for hashtags. A similar quantity of hashtags on Facebook or LinkedIn would annoy users. But before you share hashtag-friendly content between Twitter and Instagram, remember that your soft sell on Instagram will be chopped off at 140 characters on Twitter. You can get away with a tweet without an image but an Instagram post with no image—well, that simply doesn’t exist. See the dilemma? And those are just the basics. We’ve got to take the time to learn the best uses for each platform. Then we’ve got to learn how users speak to one another in their respective communities. We must re-evaluate what good marketing looks like. No $899.99...

Building a house is nothing like ordering a pizza over the phone. But maybe it should be. With few exceptions, restaurants order ingredients and supplies in advance. They create a menu of offerings and then take orders over the phone based on the menu listings. Substitutions are made when the order is placed. Once the staff ensures that they have what’s needed, the order is filled. What if contractors took the same approach? It has happened before with a high success rate. Rosie Romero offered “the impossible promise” that projects would come in on time and on budget, or they would be free. Jeb Breithaupt of JEB Design/Build in Shreveport, La. reports to Builder Online that he’s making a similar offer to his clients.  Both offer the promise by mimicking the pizza process. The design/build firms spec out the project, like creating a menu and pricing. Clients then make selections and customizations as needed. Once the availability of materials is verified, the orders are placed. Homeowners view and approve the orders and then ground breaks on the project. Clients can’t go back and make changes to the order. The contractors aren’t surprised by changes in price or the availability of materials after the fact. It’s all arranged before the first shovel juts into the ground. This process makes so much sense. “That’s what my company tries to do on custom home projects. I’ve also tried it on a couple of design/build jobs, and believe it or not, it’s making our process smoother and our clients happier,” says Breithaupt. The pizza process has notable benefits. It saves time: No more waiting for materials to arrive or delaying progress because of scheduling problems with subcontractors. Everything is available when and where you need it because it...

September is REALTOR Safety Month, an excellent opportunity to spread awareness about security and safety issues facing our industry.  The list below highlights seven safety tips that can keep you safe while working and networking online. Review your company’s internet policy and stick with it. We understand that policies are absolutely positively boring but they are in place for very good reasons. Rules for downloading apps and software can be particularly important as they prevent viruses and hackers from gaining easy access to your machine—and all of the sensitive data that can be accessed from it. Not even your mother deserves your passwords. It’s easy to let a co-worker or family member “borrow” your password for a quick login but resist the urge. You’re accountable for anything that happens when you’re signed in. Also, avoid using the same credentials for your personal and professional accounts. Your password should be as complicated as tax law. Each account should have a unique password with a mixture of characters (capitals, symbols, numbers). While they may be easier to remember, avoid using names and dates, which many people could figure out just by browsing your Facebook profile. Make security software updates automatic. You’ve got enough to remember as it is. Keep your machine, client data and personal data safe by maintaining updated security software at all times. Think twice about clicking links, even from coworkers. If you receive an email or chat from a coworker that seems suspicious—words and punctuation that they don’t use, topics they’d never broach—it’s probably a scam. Delete or quarantine the message immediately. If you’re uncertain, check with your peer through an alternate method to confirm that he or she is the sender. Invest in identity protection.  In our increasingly digital age, so much...

Keeping tabs on customer satisfaction at an office building, retail center or apartment community is a never-ending task. Almost any encounter with a tenant or resident presents an opportunity to find out where the room for improvement exists. And there is no substitute for face-to-face contact when it comes to finding out what is on the customer’s mind. Whether the methods are highly structured or informal, gathering and assessing feedback has a single purpose at the core: attracting and keeping customers. To foster a systematic approach to evaluating customer satisfaction, many owners use surveys that are administered by the Kingsley Associates research firm. Tenants are asked to grade the property and its management team on a wide variety of topics, ranging from response time to service requests and quality of building maintenance to overall satisfaction and intentions to renew. Most owners and managers use about 80 percent of the standard survey template, but requests for customized questions are common, according to Kingsley. Owners and managers say that a standardized format allows them to review how properties in their own portfolios stack up against one another. If the scores for an individual property or a geographic area indicate tenant discontent, owners and third-party service providers expect the manager to devise and carry out a plan for improvement. Moreover, survey results frequently figure into the property manager’s performance review, providing an added incentive to raise the bar. Using a standardized, nationally distributed questionnaire also provides property owners and managers with a broader perspective on their performance. Once the decision is made to survey tenants or multi-family residents, getting maximum value from them is an art in itself. The first and probably most important step is identifying the appropriate person to complete the survey, which may be...

The commercial real estate industry can learn a lot from its rising stars. Still young enough to be idealistic and take advice from their mentors, industry under-40—and sometimes under-30—achievers are able to turn it into successful business. Unfortunately, it is human nature to forget or lay aside ideals with age and experience—but doing so may result in unwittingly also passing up potential for even better performance in the long term. Years of interviewing industry up-and-comers has brought to my attention the fact that in reality there are only a few basic tenets that come up again and again, regardless of property sector or business segment: Aside from the obvious hard work and development of market knowledge, these include such characteristics as taking an ethical approach to business (honesty counts); seeking to build relationships with clients over the long term rather than focusing on the deal at hand; striving to please not just the client, tenant or customer but the other side of the table as well—along with passion, creativity, teamwork, accountability, attention to detail and a continued interest in learning and growing. Twenty years ago, such concepts might have been brushed aside as impractical and idealistic. Today’s more sophisticated strategies probably lend themselves better to retaining such a list and making it part of regular business practices. A holistic approach to corporate clients that includes saying “no” to bad or unnecessary deals as well as “yes” to those that may be less lucrative for the broker but smarter for the client pays off in the long run in the form of a longer and bigger relationship. Likewise, a more holistic consideration of a building’s or even a portfolio’s processes can result in greater efficiency and therefore lower cost of operation.  Leasing to the right...