First of all, always check your warranty (and keep such paperwork in the first place).  If you can get a free repair or replacement, that’s ideal.  Always check that an issue is with the machine, and not with outlet, circuit breaker, fuse, gas, or water.  You don’t want to waste time trying to fix something that ain’t broken.

Fixing an appliance yourself might be more feasible than a salesperson will lead you to believe.  If you think you can handle it on your own, then make sure the appliance is disconnected from electricity or gas.  An owner’s manual is another paper that is worth keeping in a folder somewhere for that fateful day when you need to dissemble an item bigger than you.

If pieces of an appliance are held together with screws, bolts, or other fasteners you can easily dismantle with your own toolbox, great.  If they’re welded together, you’ll need to call a professional repairperson.  Sometimes, you may need to buy a new part but not an entire new machine.

The “50 Percent Rule” is a simple measure of whether it makes financial sense to buy a new appliance.  If it costs 50 percent or less to repair an item, rather than replace it, then repair away.  If a repair will cost more than half of the replacement cost, it probably makes sense to hit up the store.  Consumer Reports also recommends replacing things that are over eight years old, unless it’s a high-end piece of equipment that you’d rather keep.

Remember:  Energy Star appliances are cheaper and more available than ever before.  If you do purchase a new machine, consider choosing one that uses less energy and that will therefore cost less over time.

Want to chime in? We’d love to hear from you – here or on our Facebook page!

While it remains to be seen whether or not Google+ will be able to compete directly with Facebook or even last into 2012 (after their initial mass-joining, their momentum seems to have decreased by quite a bit), for the time being we are joining the bandwagon. Why should you join us?

1. SEO

As TechCrunch posted on Monday, “is a lot like Facebook Pages, but there’s one major difference: Google is baking some elements of Google+ Pages deep into its bread-and-butter search product.” Simply put, as we’ve always suspected with Facebook and Twitter, social affirmations (or Plus 1′s in this case) might very well be directly correlated with search results.

2. Direct Connect

Advanced Google queries have allowed a ‘+’ for years, to add a specific term to search results. However, now it seems that an individual searching can add +MyNewPlace or +Muppets (etc) into their search window, which will immediately add these terms to their Circles. This means they will receive updates and information in their individual news feeds automatically. This feature seems a bit comparable to a Twitter instant follow. Enabling this feature requires linking your Google+ page to your home page – Google+ will walk you through the process once you create your page.

3. Another Social Sharing Platform

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube seem to have staying power…MySpace…not so much. If Google+ does stick around, its enhanced SEO and consumer-connect aspects seem worth the early investment. Those of us who have been paying attention to social media for the last decade or so have learned that early adopters often experience greater success than those late to the party. It takes a minimal investment to get involved now, giving it a chance seems worthwhile.

Questions? Comments? Doubts? We’d love to hear from you – here, or on our Google+ page

1. Make sure that cell reception is great.

Adults in Gen Y use cell phones to connect with friends and family on a more or less constant basis. They text, call, Facebook, tweet and email from their smart phones and they spend a lot of money to use this convenient piece of technology. It’s vital to make sure that the cell reception is great everywhere in the complex and in the apartments because there is nothing more annoying that not being able to use your phone in your own apartment. Keep in mind that most people in Gen Y have absolutely no interest in having a land line so offering this as an alternative is not going to cut it.

2. Provide wireless access.

One of the best perks you can offer a person in Gen Y who is looking for a new place to live is access to internet (and fast internet at that). People in this generation who are just moving out of the dorms are used to having the internet at their fingertips at all times. Ensuring that wireless will be available throughout the complex is a great way to attract young renters.

3. Install sound systems throughout the unit.

An apartment complex that is constructing a new building or retrofitting an old one would do well to invest in internal speaker systems. These systems are embedded into the walls and allow renters to plug their devices in and enjoy their music in every room of the apartment. They can also be connected to televisions to provide quick and easy surround-sound. While these systems come at a cost, they are also a huge plus for a generation that brings its music and entertainment everywhere.

4. Turn your community room into a high tech rec room.

In many apartment complexes, the community room consists of a few couches and chairs and perhaps a coffee table littered with old magazines. These rooms largely stand empty and it’s no wonder: they don’t have anything to offer. Turning this empty gathering place into a kind of high-tech, private coffee shop is a great way to help renters feel connected to the apartment community. Make sure there’s wireless available but also include a few computers that your renters can use free of charge in case theirs are down. An espresso machine and a gaming center with a large television and the latest X-Box games will also get your Gen Y residents to gather together and help build up your community.

Have questions or comments? We’d love to hear from you – here or on our Facebook page!

1. Start a blog.

Blogging is a great way to advertise your apartment complex. You can blog about the community, upcoming events in the area, tips for renters and anything else that relates to life in the complex. Inviting your renters to submit blog posts is a great way to get your residents more involved in their community. Not only will this show potential renters what a welcoming, active community you have, but the enhanced content on your site will help search engine traffic find your site in the first place!

2. Tweet.

When used correctly, Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool – as well as a great way to show your personality and knowledge. You’ll want to make sure you interact with your online community and make connections relevant to your business in order to make the most out of this social media tool. Twitter takes time and commitment to be useful – so be patient!

3. Create a Facebook Fan Page.

A fan page is a great way to encourage a conversation about your apartment community. Post links to your blog posts and tweets on your fan page and be sure to communicate personally with the fans that leave comment. Facebook is also a great platform for promoting contests and promotions. Want a more ‘apartment centric’ social network? Try inMultifamily!

4. Create videos of your available units.

Making video tours of your available units is a great way to attract new renters. Touring units in person can be time consuming and inconvenient since it often requires a potential renter take the day off work. Producing high-quality videos can let potential renters know exactly what the units and community look like before they arrive. Make sure your videos look professional and use a wide-angle lens on the camera when filming indoors.

5. Use Google +.

Google + is a new social media tool similar to Facebook and Twitter. It’s still growing so now is the time to get involved with this online community.

6. Use text messaging.

Many people prefer to communicate via text rather than by e-mail or over the phone. If you make this an option, you’ll be reaching out to your more tech-savvy residents and making yourself more available to potential residents.

7. Be creative in your print ads.

Print is far from dead and is an important part of any successful advertising campaign. Use print ads that help you stand out from your competition instead of run-of-the-mill photos of the front office. Resident submitted photos are always nice.

8. Provide helpful information.

Being an expert in your field is a great way to reach out to your community and attract future renters, especially if you extend your helpfulness to people who aren’t a good match for your community as well. If you don’t allow pets, have some recommendations ready to provide over the phone. Word of mouth is one of the best advertising tools and if the word gets out that your apartment complex is friendly and helpful, you’ll attract more renters in the future.

9. Be more visible in your community.

Interact with the organizations in your city or town and make yourself known. Engage in mutual advertising with social clubs, recreation centers and even other apartment complexes.

10. Maintain relationships.

Keep in touch with the people who come into your office even if they decide not to rent. A hand-written thank you note goes a long way towards maintaining a good relationship. If you make it known that you care, people who chose not to rent from you once may come around the next time they’re looking for a place to live.

Unfamiliar with Facebook, Twitter, and the blog-o-sphere? Or maybe you are very interested in going even more in depth? Check out MyNewPlace RentEngine to get started!

As a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s start there:

Facebook Timeline Cover Photo, Profile Re-Arrangement

(please click the image for a bigger size and less compression!)

This is the new Facebook ‘cover image’ (the huge one of my dog, Leroy) along with a smaller ‘profile picture’ which automatically imports from your current profile picture. As you can see, instead of left side tabs now your ‘Friends’, ‘Photos’, ‘Map’, and ‘Likes’ are buttons on top. Also important are the dates on the top right – they are clickable links that help you go directly to different periods on your timeline.

Next Up: Status Update Change and Life Event Icons

Status updates work much as before and can be found directly below the cover image and profile picture. Not the tiny, unfamiliar icons to the right of the familiar Facebook functions. It turns out these are here to help you retroactively fill in your timeline so it more accurately reflects a natural progression of your life’s events. In this way, Facebook Timeline becomes much like a scrapbook for helping you cobble together your memories, pictures, friendships, and life events. Each icon opens a drop-down menu to a series of suggestions and then an open ended entry link, as shown below:

Activity Listed In A Two-Column Format, Persistent ‘Ticker’ and Chat Availability Window On Right

(please click the image for a bigger size and less compression!)

Your ‘up to the minute’ activity ticker remains on the right, as in the new Facebook page design, and so does your chat availability. Your status updates, link shares, friends’ comments, and other information you upload to Facebook appears in a two-column format with endless scrolling capability (back until the day you were born). It’s all there- depending on how much information you personally choose to share. Facebook has also seriously upgraded/improved its privacy settings to help keep personal stuff on tight lock down!

When will this be available for your personal and fan page?

You can already activate your timeline if you are willing to go through about an 8-step process intended for developers. There is a great step-by-step guide at Mashable here. Not interested in becoming a Facebook developer but want to know when Timeline will be available for the general public to opt-in?  Mashable has the answer to this too:  Stefan Parker, Facebook UI Engineer on Quora, said “We are aiming to start letting users opt into Timeline in the next two to four weeks. There is no set date though.”

What does Facebook timeline mean for Multifamily?

As the ever prescient Brent Williams over at MFInsiders observed, “…the new Timeline… is a beautiful creation that shows the entire history of a user…  Whereas posts before tended to get lost after a few days, the new timeline encourages users to fill out their entire life on Facebook…(and) any post by your fans have a much longer lifespan.  But the posts that show up on the timeline don’t tend to be posts your fans made on your page, but rather status updates, pictures, videos, etc on their own profile, as well as app-related posts.  Therefore, if a fan posts something on your page, the long-term benefit won’t change, BUT if a fan posts a picture of one of your resident events on their profile, that picture will show forever in a pretty powerful way.”

Have questions or want clarifications? We’d love to hear from you – here or on our Facebook page!

Once in a (VERY) great while, the interests of activists and businesspeople align.  One such miraculous alignment has emerged recently in the apartment industry:   increasing energy efficiency of buildings, to the mutual benefit of the planet and whoever is paying the electric bills.

With many ways for buildings to reduce their energy consumption, landlords have options—everything from changing their light bulbs to energy-saving CFLs, to becoming LEED certified.  LEED certification (or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) verifies that a building has high standards in areas such as energy and water consumption, low carbon emissions, and high environmental quality indoors.  Although LEED has only been around for a decade, 10,000 properties in the commercial sector have already been certified.

In many cases, apartment building owners have stepped up their environmental game at the request of their tenants.  Student activism especially can drive change in the industry.  Given that landlords are already sniffing around for ways to measure and reduce energy consumption—and costs along with it—interest from tenants, especially enthusiastic student tenants, can be the straw that breaks the camel’s wasteful back.

And in some cases, the change has been big:  apartments in Harlem have been renovated with greener standards, and even the Empire State Building has achieved LEED Gold status.   That particular retrofit cost $550 million, and will save $4.4 million per year by cutting energy consumption 38 percent.  Some state governments are also responding to increased popularity of LEED buildings:  five of them have LEED certification for at least 10 percent of their office space.

Energy efficiency isn’t the only way the apartment industry is going green.  Other efforts include using sustainable building materials and implementing building-wide recycling programs.  Stay tuned for more MyNewPlace blog articles on how apartment living is becoming earth-friendly!

Speakers that look like rocks

Imagine:  you manage to get your date to come home with you after dinner.  You take her out on to your balcony, adorned with flowers and—you guessed it—decorative rocks.  Then, out of nowhere, she hears romantic music from those very rocks. Most surprising date move ever!  Plus, because your neighbors can’t recognize these babies for what they really are, you could even keep them in your backyard without having them filched when you’re away.

Hogwarts Travel Posters

Never actually been to Hogwarts?  Neither has anyone else!  While the release of the final Harry Potter movie may have forever limited the appropriateness of your wizard dress robes to Halloween, you can still show off your magic worldliness with these classy, apparently vintage posters.

Shootable Clock

Is any more explanation necessary?  We’ve all woken up to an alarm and wished we were Al Capone (or is that just me?) You don’t even need a license, regardless of the state you live in, as the clock’s accompanying gun is actually a remote.  Sigh.

Convection Wall Oven

Perhaps the most practical of these suggestions, as it actually performs necessary functions without superfluous adornment.  This oven can be mounted at any height; the door can open from either side.  Hate bending over—bad back or not?  Afraid the kids will cook a lizard they found in the backyard?  Choose the location right for you, and below the stove be darned!

Robotic Vacuum

For every apartment renter that ever wished she starred in The Jetsons.  Or, for that matter, hates pushing a vacuum around.  Take a leaf out of Parks and Recreation’s book, and spice your vacuum up with a little music.  Your cleaning party is now a dance party!

Have something cool we missed? We’d love to hear from you – here or on our Facebook page!

A chart like this one works well if you and your roommates need a little bit of guidance in order to get the work done properly. Tasks are broken up by week so that roommates can complete them whenever they get a chance within the time frame. This type of chart is most useful when dealing with roommates that are responsible and self-motivated.

This type of chart specifies what day of the week a particular chore will be done on. This is helpful for roommates that have trouble motivating themselves to clean up their share of the apartment. Assigning similar tasks on the same days, such as vacuuming and sweeping, makes it possible for roommates to work together while completing their own chores. This schedule also allows plenty of room to shift things around for work or school schedules. Of course, as with any chore chart, the tasks assigned to each roommate rotate each week.

This type of chart works well for roommates who seem clueless about cleaning. Each area of the house is broken down into components that detail the chores that need to be done. One roommate could take on one room, or chores could be divided up across the rows of the chart, giving a mixture of different tasks to each roommate. Clueless cleaners also perform better as a part of a team, so roommates with a chart such as this one may choose to set aside an hour each week to all work at the same time to complete their chores.

1. Deeper Research

With more information available to them than ever before apartment renters are taking the time to look more deeply at apartments before making their final decision.  Renters consult multiple sources to get a complete picture of the apartments they are considering and compare many different options to find the best fit. By the time they come to visit an apartment, many renters will already know about its rent, its policies, and even its floor plan. This trend means that more apartments will be seen by renters, but that only apartments marketed across different media will really stand out from the rest.

2. Social Media

Nearly everyone has heard of Facebook and Twitter by now. These social sites are a powerful source of information; referrals from a renter’s friends tend to carry more influence than any other single factor when it comes to making a decision. Recent research reported by Tech Crunch found that people now use Twitter to share referrals as often as email and that Facebook is used to share referrals as much as Twitter and email combined. This trend means that apartments that get people talking online will easily find interested renters.

3. Online Ratings

Referrals from friends aren’t the only ones that matter to apartment hunters. From Amazon to Yelp, reviews and ratings on all types of products and services have become part of the online shopping experience and are becoming a larger force in the offline world as well. A handful of authentic reviews helps renters verify the information they’ve found elsewhere and commit to their apartment choice. This trend means that apartments without reviews will take longer for renters to commit to.

4. Video

The Internet today is faster today than it has ever been and this offers video a chance to finally shine online. Paul Bergeron of the National Apartment Association reports that spending for video ads is expected to increase 39% in 2011. People looking for an apartment are especially interested in video information about an apartment location because it is so relevant to the quality of life. Reading that an apartment is a sunny and friendly place to live doesn’t carry nearly as much weight as seeing a video of the place that confirms it. This trend means that videos may soon become as commonplace as photographs for apartments listed online.

5. Mobile

As more cell phone users upgrade to smartphones with Internet access, apartment renters are increasingly finding information through their mobile devices. Though most apartment hunters still browse the web on a desktop, their phones let them access information anywhere and they are making use of this when they are out exploring apartments. Mobile information accessed during the later stages of an apartment search helps prospective renters come to a decision more quickly. This trend means that apartments with mobile optimized websites and those that employ QR codes will be able to more quickly convince renters that they are a good fit.

Have you seen these trends in action? Is there a trend we missed? Let us know what you think here or on our Facebook page!

There’s a new social networking tool out there and already its generating a great deal of buzz. The tool is Google+, and though it isn’t certain yet how its introduction to the social networking market will affect established tools, a company that wants to keep up with the latest in technology should definitely be aware of what it is and what it does. Especially because, as Mashable estimates, Google+ has already amassed 10 million users in two weeks!

Google+ can be used by anyone with a google account. It allows for a profile to be set up, with pictures and links, with an interface similar to that used by the latest version of Facebook. Once the Google+ account is set up, updates, advertisements and notes can be shared with the people in the account-holder’s network.

The main feature of Google+ is that it allows users to easily and privately arrange contacts into circles. Each contact can occupy any number of circles, so a large multifamily organization can create circles for say, residents at a few different locations, employees, and even competitors. Google+ allows for a couple of levels of contact, one in which the two contacts follow one-another, like “friending” on Facebook, and one in which one contact follows the other, as in Twitter.

The other feature of Google+ is the +1 button. This button functions like the “Like” button on Facebook and also promotes the dialogue box so that it floats higher in the stream. While it isn’t necessary to accumulate +1′s, they will increase a company’s visibility.

Though Google+ allows people to quickly sort through their contacts and keep in touch with both good friends and new acquaintances, it doesn’t allow for direct contact any more than Facebook does. Google+ social networking is a mostly passive activity. Status updates and ads can easily be posted, but they have to appear in a contact’s stream in order for that contact to view them. Of course, just like in Facebook, the stream will consist of all the updates from a person’s contacts, though unlike in Facebook or Twitter, those contacts can be very easily filtered. There is a good chance that people may chose to view the streams of their friends and family more than streams that include companies or people that they don’t know personally.

Though Google+ launched originally without allowing corporate profiles, this is soon to change on a limited basis. In the meantime, if you want to begin thinking about adding a Google+ page to your property’s social media outreach, we may assume that rules that apply to other branches of social media apply here. That is, a company that wishes to connect with people through a social media tool such as Google+ will need to make sure that the content they provide is consistently interesting or entertaining. A series of posts linking to a homepage or an advertisement won’t cut it in the new social media network; it’s all to easy to hide a contact from view. While a company may have thousands of followers, this doesn’t mean that each of them are reading the content. In order to remain visible in this new network, companies will have to offer something special to their followers.

Want to learn more? We’ll keep you updated!