Monthly Archives: August 2009

This morning I attended a webinar hosted by Aimee Miller of Appfolio Property Manager and Brent Williams of Multifamily Insiders, featuring a presentation by Mike Whaling of 30lines discussing how apartment communities can improve their online marketing strategies. Mr. Whaling detailed the basics of how apartments should lay the foundation for establishing an online presence, [...]

At the beginning of the month we discussed the NMHC’s Apartment Market Conditions survey for the second quarter of 2009, which used 4 indices to measure perceived changes on Vacancies, Sales Volume, Equity and Debt Financing. Last week, we received a more detailed report from the NMHC, based on concrete numbers, which quantifies the apartment [...]

Yesterday, we posted an article in our Apartment Guide about a creative way to bring the outdoors inside apartments. The indoor vertical wall garden is just about as cool a way of decorating your apartment as shag carpeting and Absolut Vodka ads. As briefly described in that article, (so I’ll expound here) my apartment in [...]

Admittedly, this idea excites me more than the average renter because our apartment actually has an extra room that we have already loftily named “the solarium,” albeit is basically a depository of houseplants, not the glorious and verdant waterfall of chloroplasticfantastic flora pictured above. The indoor garden, of course is constrained by space, how many [...]

Yesterday, an article appeared in the Boston Globe about President Barack Obama’s plan to use around $4 billion of economic stimulus money to create new affordable housing nationwide. According to the author, this marked a watershed movement as the new administration decidedly moves away from the “ownership society” initiatives of the Bush years. The plan [...]

Now that Michael Vick is out of jail and has signed with the Philadelphia Eagles, he’ll probably want to start looking at Philadelphia apartments. We would like to take this opportunity to offer some advice to Mr. Vick on relocating. Even if you have visited a city before, it is not until you really live [...]

Wednesday’s headline at Multifamily Executive was “Fair Housing Activists Put Multifamily ILSs on Notice.” The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) claims that some ILSs are running ads that discourage families with children from applying and thereby violate the Fair Housing Act. They released a report on Monday on the subject and are recommending that the [...]

Earlier this week, we posted about how the continued growth of our company required us to go out and get a penthouse suite of a collocation area for our servers. Today, we are happy to announce two new developments on the personnel side of our business. First, our Sales team has some very exciting announcements. [...]

From the erudite desk of the NMHC come a press release on that organization’s most recent Quarterly Survey of Apartment Market Conditions (July 2009), which modestly highlights some possible signs of stabilization. The chief concern remain the stifled rental demand due to high unemployment, which is directly contributing to lower property valuations; that, of course, [...]

Last week, MyNewPlace performed what CTO and VP of Engineering Ken Cluff described as ‘open heart surgery’ on our site, which involved the delicate task of moving all of our servers to one collocation at our datacenter, 365 Main. Moving servers around is not exactly a risk-averse production; when a company is required to unplug [...]