The majority of households in the U.S. pay at least some of their bills online. The trend towards online transactions and payments, however, seems to be weaker in the multifamily industry, where many communities still don’t offer online payment options. And, while we’ve seen communities achieve participation rates from 50-70 percent, industry surveys show that, on average, less than 15 percent of apartment residents pay online. By falling behind in online payment participation, your property may be missing out on real benefits that go beyond saving a little time during rent week.

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We’re excited to share a series of new videos from Property Solutions. Our Client Stories videos let you hear from the most important people in our world: the customers who are actively using our products. In this series, expert users like Virginia Love from Waterton Residential, Doug Hastings from DEI, Jennifer Staciokas from Lincoln, and Michael Pickens form Colonial (among others), share some of their experiences with Property Solutions’ products. (Thanks, all!) We’ll be adding these and other stories to our homepage at PropertySolutions.com very soon. Stay tuned!

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Just in time for the holiday season, Property Solutions is pleased to introduce a free upgrade to our ResidentPay™ system. Your property can now use our online payment interface not only to collect rent and fees from residents, but can also accept optional donations designated to charitable fund drives or events through the same system. Bringing residents together for a good cause can be particularly rewarding and build a strong sense of community. We’ve discovered for ourselves how much fun it can be by sponsoring charity dodgeball game.

The system upgrade is already available to anyone using ResidentPay. Properties can select one or several charitable organizations for which they’d like to collect funds and provide suggested donation amounts for residents ($1, $5, $20, etc.) When a resident pays rent online, they see the “Donate” option on the billing information screen and can select from available organizations and donation amounts.

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Everyone knows your property needs curb appeal to get prospects out of their cars and into the leasing office. However, first impressions are less likely to occur on the roadside than they are to happen on the information superhighway. So how can you create a consistent, visual brand across your website and web advertising and without spending an arm and a leg? More importantly, what decision are you going to make concerning custom design? But let’s not forget… how can you do all that and still keep all the advanced functionality you are looking for? It’s easier than you think.

Property Solutions is inviting you to our monthly webinar to learn about our public, private, and custom themes. Our team of experts will cover ways you can encourage prospects to visit your website by incorporating website design and staying up to date. In addition, our experts will discuss the Property Solutions gallery of themes and upcoming changes.

So by now you’ve likely heard of an increasingly common practice on Craigslist of user ads being “ghosted”. This term is used to describe a situation where you post an ad and the system tells you it has been published. You can even see your post when you search from your browser. But the ad never appears on the Craigslist page and is not visible to anyone but you. So, how do you know if your ads are being ghosted?

Property Solutions has created a new tool that can help. An upgrade to our Craigslist Posting system allows us to identify ads that are ghosted and udpdate each ad’s status nightly. We’ve been able to use this tool to determine that some ads may actually be active for a day or two, then disappear from the listings.

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In June we announced a new mobile app for residents that allows residents to easily make rent payments and submit maintenance requests. We are pleased to announce that the app is now available for all smartphones using the Android operating system.

Once residents download the app, they will be able to locate your property and enter their ResidentPortal™ credentials to activate the app’s functionality. Once that’s done, they’ll never need to log in again: rent payments and work orders will be, literally, at their fingertips. Additional functionality is coming soon. This new accessibility can help with increased participation, improving efficiency in the leasing office as well as boosting resident satisfaction.

The app is a free download and is automatically activated for all properties using Property Solutions’ MobilePortal™. For more details, contact your Account Manager.

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Property Solutions’ CEO, Dave Bateman, is a man who works hard. He’s a hands-on guy who has logged more hours than anyone else on our team and contributed to our success not only with great ideas, but with the hard work to back them up. Dave leads by inspiration and regularly rallies the troops to turn the most improbably ideas into reality. Oh, and he likes to have a good time.

So, a few months ago, when Dave decided the Property Solutions needed to break a world record he didn’t have much trouble getting the whole team behind him. As a result, we are days away from the event of a lifetime.

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