You may think the secret to success is money, recognition or luck, but Steven and Randy Fifield, MHN’s 2015 Executives of the Year, shared that their success started with peanut butter and jelly. At the annual Multi-Housing News Excellence Awards on October 14th at Club 101 in Manhattan, the Fifields engaged in a panel discussion with Yardi Matrix Vice President Jeff Adler (photo, left), and shared some advice, insights and anecdotes from their long careers in real estate as Chairs of the Fifield Companies. While discussing the ins and outs of experiential marketing, Randy said that in order to make apartment living attractive to busy professionals with money to spend, she’d serve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to people who work in the area and would stop in on their lunch break. “What they do is they work in the CBD (central business district) and then they come home to let the dog out because we have beautiful parks around the neighborhood, and they’d eat peanut butter and jelly because they could talk on the phone and nothing would drip on them and they’d let the dog out, have this great life and then walk back to work,” she said. Obviously the road to success is not literally paved with peanut butter and jelly, but serving homemade sandwiches is just one anecdote that personifies the Fifields’ knack for giving renters what they want before they even know exactly what that is. It’s not an easy feat, especially in a market where the renters themselves are evolving almost as quickly as their demands are. “The median age has been moving up; 95 percent of the renters are college graduates. The median income in virtually all these transit-oriented urban projects has been over $100,000. It’s a totally different market,...