Thanks for your efforts in polling our industry. The main issue here is the fact that PM/FM cover a huge spectrum of categories. I have heard people refer to those caring for single family homes to those managing millions of sf of retail, office or other commercial facilities. That range is so incredibly diverse. I would like to know the area of expertise metric here. In other words, if someone sells residential homes and cares for those vacant homes while they are being disposed of, that is one small segment of our overall industry. That to me is the most important aspect of the survey. Once you understand the industry type you can then identify the trends or changing habits of the segments.

I really appreciate what you are doing and wish you much success with your endeavor.

Thanks,
Linda@ManagerLabs.com
LinkedIn – PFMI Group
Click here to Join: http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=1858850

Thanks for conducting this survey and sharing your results! You pose some great questions as you shared these results.

My thoughts are posted here:

http://letstalkpropertymanagement.com/perspectives/2009/12/17/analysis-of-property-managers-use-of-technology.html

Good point.

Boyd Keith Adams

I agree that social media has value for property managers. I think that it’s difficult to track or measure that value though.

Unfortunately we did not ask what area our respondents were in. Geography definitely has a big influence on increasing/decreasing business. Those property managers in areas with high home foreclosures are probably doing better than most.

I’ll take a look to see if our survey software tracked anything about a respondent’s location.

Thanks for reading.

Responding to your summary question, “What strength does social media have in the business of property management?” Answer is…it provides marketing and influential MoJo in the community where your residents live, shop, dine and recreate. Does it get any better than that?

Everyone one of us understands the need to relate activity to revenue. ROI, ROI, ROI. ROI should probably be a required brand we all need to tattoo on our bodies.

Case studies, whitepapers and simple metrics gathered from real live onsite activities by third party technology solutions (LevelOne, CallSource, Crossfire) show time and again that simply engaging the apartment shoppers and residents that Community Managers are currently exposed to will lead to higher closing ratios and reduce resident turnover. Heck…THAT would certainly impact ROI.

Social Networking provides a clear channel for owner/operators to become vocal members of neighborhoods. Holy cannoli…a wiki or a blog or a tweet or a facebook page EMPOWERS us enabling us to post REALTIME comments, answer and ask questions. In short, Social Networking allows apartment operators to do some fancy Ninja-ing in bonding with their residents and future residents.

Imagine that…bonding with your clients. Reminds me of a statement on an article I read a few days ago; in typical budgets and business financial statements…

Do we have a line item or formula that calculates the ROI of a phone? I’m thinking NOT.

Tamela
http://Twitter.com/TamelaCoval
Tamela

When I started in real estate 10 years ago, there were lots of phone calls, drive bys, actually going to look at a property. But now you can do almost the entire transaction online, other than having a live person go inspect the property for hidden issues & an appraiser doing an appraisal, a property can be bought and sold almost virtually online using technology.