ElectricStreets Promotes Lease Up and Tenant Retention

Building Online Apartment Communities... "Lease up and tenant retention." Those are the two biggest challenges facing multifamily property owners, according to Larry Bouchard of ElectricStreets.com, which builds "resident portals" to strengthen resident communications. A residential portal is a branded private web site for a specific multifamily property.

For example, Camden Property Trust is currently rolling out ElectricStreets to over 150 properties. Bouchard demonstrated how a Camden resident would use this service, branded as "CamdenLiving." Naturally, residents can request a service call online, which is often the first impetus to sign up. But Camden then promotes its "community building" features like Neighbor-to-Neighbor, which enables residents to connect with other residents with similar interests.

Like the commercial sector, the residential sector has seen a huge meltdown of broadband initiatives. Consequently, the vast majority of tenants access ElectricStreets web service at dialup modem speeds, a hindrance to adoption. Nevertheless, Bouchard reports that usage is spreading, largely because of "word of mouth" with over twenty percent participation within three months.

ElectricStreets' portal service costs $150 per month per property and is offered on an ASP model, meaning that all of the software and data resides on ElectricStreets' server. Property owners can use administrative tools to track service calls across a portfolio to find frequently occurring problems and to monitor response times. Want to learn more? Meet Bouchard and see ElectricStreets at the PikeNet Forum, where he'll have a Networking Table. Click Networking Tables for the complete list.

--Peter Pike