rent apartment san jose

aimee: all right. welcome everybody. i'm sure you're all just finished watchingthe world cup. we were just talking about that. it's so exciting that the u.s. gets to advance. i'm not sure if that's a spoiler alert therebut my name is aimee miller and i'm the vice president of marketing here at appfolio andwe're providers of web-based property management software. we also regularly host these great, free,educational events that are designed for property

management professionals just like you. today we're super-excited about our presentationbecause we have carey with us from zillow. she's going to present some really interestingrental market trends and other great stuff too. i always like to start these webinars witha few logistics so you know how everything works. on your right-hand side is the gotowebinarapplication and this is a great spot for you to send us questions. we will have a little bit of time at the endof the presentation to ask carey questions

to please do submit them into our little questionbox there with gotowebinar. one of the most common questions we get iswill we be recording this session, so will you have access to it later to share withall of your friends and review again and again? and the great answer is yes, we are recordingthe session and we will post it as a blog post with a link to the recording so you canlisten to the information while you watch the slide. so let me start by telling you just a tinylittle bit about our web-based property management we have a complete solution and one of thereasons why we love presenting this kind of educational content is because our softwarereally enhances and helps all parts of a property

management business from complete accountingto property management. we offer online rent collection and marketingyour vacancies. one of the feeds that we post you is of coursezillow's rental feed so that's a great reason why we also love working with zillow. we offer a beautiful website, so professionalweb presence is so important in today's day and age, the ability to accept online applications,online leases and we're just introducing now the ability to have mobile inspections andmost all of these features, actually almost all of them are included with your monthlyservice. the ultimate ending is that you'll run a moresuccessful business using our web-based property

management software. so at the end of this session there will bea chance and if you're not in love with your current software, now is the great time atthe end to click on that little button and we'll be sure to reach out to you and giveyou a little more information about appfolio. now i'm going to pass it on to laura, fromzillow, to give us a little intro to zillow rentals. there you go, laura. laura: thank you. hi everybody.

this is laura. i am the marketing manager for rentals hereat zillow. i just wanted to start off with a quick overviewof zillow rentals and what that means. we are the largest rental site currently inthe u.s. we have 15 million renters visit the siteeach month to zillow and hotpads. we also have our rental listings syndicatedacross yahoo and aol so a lot of exposure there for listings. our inventory includes not only apartmentsbut also condos and single-family houses. and then one of the unique offerings thatthe zillow rental network gives folks is we

have a lot of unique rental data which alsoincludes rental price history and our rent estimates. posting is free for buildings with fewer than50 units and then for multi-family properties we have a transparent and performance-basedprogram called rent connect for those folks with over 50 units. that's just a quick overview of the zillowrental network. now i will hand it off to carey armstrong,our director of rentals and she's going to take us through zillow's outlook on how tothrive in today's evolving rental market. carey: thanks, laura.

i'm so excited to talk to you guys today aboutthe rental market and here's just a bit about what we'll focus on. we're going to talk about the rental marketoverall nationally and then we're going to dive into some of the variations that existin subsets of the market. and then once we've covered that we're goingto talk about best practices for promoting listings in your market and some of the thingsthat might differ if you're in a hotter market or a cooler market. hopefully you'll leave with lots of greattips and some concrete next steps to take. so to look at this from the highest leveljust talking about housing in general, as

many of you know, in the great housing crisisof 2008 we saw a real decline in the number of new households that were formed. what that means is people stopped moving outand splitting up existing households and creating new ones and that's one of the biggest causesof demands for housing whether it's having to buy or having to rent in the u.s. so when that household formation dropped,what happened? i mean, where do people go if they're notcreating new households? the answer is that they double up so thatmight mean that a 23-year-old moves back in with their parents after they graduate fromcollege or it might mean that three people

in their 30s who are living together don'tsplit up and each get a 1-bedroom apartment. they stay together in the 3-bedroom apartmentand it's pretty easy to imagine the impact that has on the housing market when peoplestay grouped together in houses instead of forming new households. how did this apply to rentals? it's pretty broad to talk about householdformation in general. one of the really interesting things that'sgoing on is not only are there new households being formed but when there are new householdsbeing formed, they are more often than not, rental households and that's really unusual.

looking back, we can only see a couple ofyears where that's been the case. in the early '80s that was also the case butsince then, new households have typically been formed when people buy houses not whenthey rent them but since 2005 we've seen a lot more trepidation about buying and it'sgotten much more severe starting around 2008. i'd love to ask you guys about what your opinionis about when this will change. it's easy to prognosticate when you've gotlots of data but i'm curious, looking at what you guys are seeing in your local market,when do you think that new household formation will change? when will tip back to buying and away fromrenting?

i'll hand this over to aimee to ask the pollingquestion. aimee: all right, perfect. i'm going to go ahead and launch this poll. this is a really interesting question. when do you think that the majority of thesenew household formations will kick back toward buying and away from renting? go ahead and answer the poll as everyone isvoting right now and we'll see what we all think on the call. all right.

so there are some good . . . actually it'sinteresting so people are coming in. let me go ahead . . . i'm going to close thepoll and i'll present the results. oh, gosh, there's more voting. okay, got them all. only 10% of our audience thinks this is goingto change within the next year. forty-two percent think within two to fouryears. thirty-eight percent said five or more yearsand 10% of our audience said never. what do you think about that? carey: that's really interesting.

that is . . . and the press loves to say maybethis is a permanent change in how we think about housing in the u.s. it sounds like 10% of the audience agrees. i think i tend to side a little bit more withthe two to four years and maybe even the five-plus year segments. i think less than one year is probably a littlebit too fast. aimee: great. so thanks. we'll have a couple more polling questionscoming up.

it's always great to get your input on thesetopics. carey: what's going on in prices as a resultof this change in household formation? the fact that there's more demand for rentalsif you remember your basic economics, more demand tends to increase prices unless you'vegot corresponding increase in supply and when we look across the country that's what wesee. i'll share a few more data points on specificmarkets but just to show how many metro areas are seeing pretty healthy increases in rentalprices, it looks pretty good and it's really broad too so high price increases across thecountry. what that means for renters is not unfortunatelywhat it means for landlords so u.s. rental

affordability as taken a real nosedive. rent now makes up about 30% of income forrenters and that's way higher than it's been historically. in 2000 it was at a low of 22% or 23%. so how has that changed? we say that prices are going up and there'sa lot of demand out there. what do vacancy rates look like from yearto year? actually from 2013 to 2014 they were prettyflat and the reason for that is we saw a lot of new inventory coming onto the market.

i don't know what it looks like in the marketswhere you guys live but here in seattle where zillow is headquartered, oh my gosh, thereare new apartment buildings going up on every corner it feels like. some days i feel like i'm going to come homeand find my house gone and i'll have an apartment building in its place. people really are trying to meet that demandand that's one of the reasons that we're not actually seeing vacancy rates changing thatmuch in most regions. that said, while they're not changing muchover time, there are big differences in vacancy rates in various markets so what i've gothere are the 25 metro areas with the lowest

vacancy rates in the u.s. and the 25 metroareas with the highest vacancy rates. there are really big differences. some of these metro areas you'll probablyknow about from headlines. for example, san jose and san francisco showup here as having very low vacancy rates and it's important to know that san franciscois the entire metro area. if you look at just the city of san francisco,the vacancy rate would be even lower. it wouldn't include oakland and fremont. this is very interesting for you to look atand i've included the bottom of the slide so you can just google this u.s. census rentalvacancy rates for 75 largest msas and you'll

get this data and you can see what it lookslike for your specific market. then let's look at what it looks like on theprice side. the zillow rent index, and that's what i showeda map of a few slides ago, you can think of that as kind of the average rental price forgeography and that includes all homes whether they're actually for rent or not. we still know what they would rent for usingour rent estimate. so what we've seen is that the overall u.s.zillow rent index has increased 2.3% in the last year and when you look at specific markets,157 have had an increase in the zillow rental index and only 33 have had a decrease.

that's why on the previous slide the decreasesactually weren't that low and there were a lot of msas that had increases. so let's look at how prices have changed inspecific markets. you might recall that san jose was one ofthe markets that had really low vacancy. it looks like supply has not kept up withthat and as a result san jose, the metro area, has had 11% increase in prices so that's areally big change. i think akron also reappears from low vacancyto the top rent index changes as well. then of course, you've got some folks on theother side. i mentioned only 33 metro areas had decreasingrental prices and as you can see, their decreases

weren't even that high. negative 2% doesn't look like much comparedto 26% on the other side so i guess the takeaway here is overall rental prices are going upsubstantially and there aren't many places where they're going down and even in thoseplaces they're not going down by an awful lot. we have time for one more polling questionjust to find out what this looks like to you. so here we go. i'm going to launch this poll. the question is how would you characterizeyour local rental market taking into factors

like vacancy rate, prices and time to lease? your choices are it's hot, somewhat hot, somewhatcold, or cold. let's see what you all think. carey and i were talking about this a littlebit before so we have a guess about what you're going to say but we're very curious to hearwhat you actually do say. so i got everyone voting. i always love the polling part. i can see the little percentage going up asi watch it so it's exciting. i'm going to go ahead and close the poll.

we've got a large majority who have votedand i'm going to share the results. forty percent said hot and 50% said somewhathot so 90% of our audience feels that it's hot. ten percent said somewhat cold and only 1%said cold. so this is what we thought right, carey? carey: yeah, this is exactly what we predicted,maybe more extremely than we expected. ninety percent feeling like it's hot is prettyimpressive and it's true. nationally it is hot. i guess it's not possible for 90% to be hotif you're doing it relatively.

not everybody can get an a in the hotnessbut i think what you guys are all feeling is that it's much hotter than it used to beand that's the case. that is absolutely true from an economic standpoint. great. so let's keep that in mind as we move forward. i've got some specific things to tell youguys who are in hot markets. we're going to shift at this point and talka little bit more about best practices for marketing your listings and just to sort oflay the groundwork, i want to share with you a framework for how we think about marketinga listing.

we think that the most important thing todo is to think about the process as a funnel and that funnel runs from listing to lease. so your goal obviously is to get the propertyleased and to do that you start with getting views of your listing and that's the broadestpart of the funnel so it's just exposing your listing to as many people as possible. some of the things you can do to improve thatthat we'll talk about are syndicating your listing more places and also optimizing itfor search so that you get more people returning your listing in their results. so what do you do after views?

you goal is to get from views to leads, toget as many leads per view as possible and that's about conversion. we'll talk about that as well, how you canimprove those rates. and of course from leads to showings takesyou from a basic inquiry to an actual person that you're showing the property to and we'lltalk a bit about how to increase your chances there too. but the last thing, that's what really whatyou guys are all experts in so i'm not going to dive too deeply into that. turning showings into leases is all aboutthe property manager, the property and the

price and you guys really are the expertsthere. i want to say one thing specifically for thefolks who live in hot markets. for the 90% of you who live in hot markets,it's really easy to think that in a hot market you can sort of relax about the funnel andbe a little less disciplined but i actually think it's just as important in hot marketsfor a slightly different reason than it is in cool markets. and that's that in hot markets the betteryou manage your funnel, the higher you can set your rental price so that top part ofthe funnel, the views that your listing gets, they're a great way to test the market withhigher rental price points.

that's really important in hot markets becauseas you can see, some markets increase 26% year over year. it's hard to keep track of what the rightprice is when the market is growing that quickly and sometimes the best way to do it is toget feedback by setting a price high and then if necessary, lowering it. it's really challenging sometimes. we hear property managers saying "my leaselisting is leasing really fast at the prices i'm setting right now and i'm posting on justone site so i'm all set." we would encourage you to think about postingto more sites at a higher price point and

see what you can get for your landlords asa result. of course the more views you're getting, themore time you have to adjust if you find that the price point really is too high but thatfeedback is really valuable. that way you can tell your landlords "we triedat a slightly higher price point and didn't get a lot of bites," instead of saying "oh,we rented it really fast at the price point that was conservative." you always want your landlord to know thatyou're doing the most you can to maximize the returns on their investment. so let's talk about tips on those variouspoints of the funnel.

i mentioned that syndication is the best wayto grow the top of your funnel and that's really just about where your properties areseen. as aimee mentioned earlier, appfolio is greatas a property management tool and one of the reasons that it's great is that it syndicatesrental listings to zillow so you have the option to put them on zillow and also on manyother sites. i'm going to share with you one other exampleof postlets which is a tool i'm really familiar. the nice thing about any syndication toolis that you can create a listing in one place, automatically syndicate it to lots of otherplaces and then manage it in those places so just like you go back to appfolio and editthat listing once and the changes would flow

through to zillow and all the other sites,you can do the same in postlets and that's so much easier than posting it in six differentplaces yourself and trying to remember what those six places are when you want to changethe price or add a new photo. the more places you put your listing, themore eyeballs you're going to get, and the more potential leads, showings and leasesyou can get. one thing to keep in mind when you're postingyour listing is that not every point in the week is the best time to post your listingso we've taken a look at the traffic on zillow and we've figured out what the average isin every week and then we've compared the days of the week to that average.

we've found that monday is really a runawayhit for rental shoppers. rental shoppers love shopping on monday. the weekend ends and they're back to the grind. rental shopping often feels like a chore sothey do it during the work week so you want to be on top of that. because the largest rental sites all sortby date posted, the more recently you've posted the higher your listing will be in the searchresults and it's pretty common for renters not to click too deep into search resultsbecause they want to see the most recent listings. i would recommend always posting on mondaymornings and if necessary tuesdays or wednesdays

but try to avoid fridays and saturdays. once your listing is up, a lot of sites havekeyword search so this should be something you should keep in mind when you're writingdescriptions. i know there are a lot of descriptions outthere that have words like spacious, beautiful, gorgeous and lovely in them. keep in mind that while those might communicatesomething to the renter, they're not going to do you any favors in terms of search. renters search for words like pool, graniteand open floor plan so you need to make sure that concrete terms that renters are lookingfor in a property are in your descriptions

so that your description gets returned tothem and this will increase your page views as well. the other thing to write about when you'rewriting your descriptions is that this is really your face to the world. this is something that renters look at reallycarefully. zillow has done a lot of focus groups in marketresearch lately and we've been really impressed about how renters try to read into a descriptionabout what the property and the property manager is like so if they see things in the descriptionthat make them feel uncomfortable they may decide "this landlord doesn't seem reallyprofessional," or "i don't think they're the

kind of person that's going to get back tome quickly when my toilet starts leaking." grammar might have nothing to do with thatbut they don't have a lot to go on and when we asked renters, 72% of the say that grammaris an indication of professionalism. unfortunately, a lot of rental ads fall shorton that front. twenty-one percent include sentences in allcaps and that's a pet peeve of many renters. our data said 7% but i think we're missinga lot. it feels more like a quarter including grammaticalerrors just based on the samples that i see. so always use microsoft word to do spellingand grammar checks and honestly sometimes just get a second set of eyes on it as well.

i just want to call out one thing. people especially hate caps in titles so viewsper ad go up substantially if you use proper caps instead of using all caps or mixed capsin your title. so let's talk about other attributes. a lot of sites have structured data fieldsthat you can fill out, forms, if you will, that you can use to describe your propertyin a way that goes beyond what's in your description. these are things that renters care about alot and they're the kinds of things that rental sites help them search for using filters. if you're including this information in adescription but not in a structured data field,

sometimes that means that you won't actuallyget the result returned by the search site's filters so make sure that you do a good jobfilling out the check boxes and writing a description. what we hear from renters is that they'relooking for location. that's one of the reasons they love map-basedsearch on zillow. they want lots and lots of pictures. they want them of every part of their property,inside and outside and they get very frustrated when they don't have them. they also love to see floor plans which youcan include on your pictures.

they want to know the date the property'savailable. it's not helpful to them if it's availablebefore they're ready to move or after. people care deeply about their pets. nobody wants to leave fido behind for theperfect rental and then parking, laundry and square footage are also pretty important. square footage is a bit polarizing. some renters are really hung up on it. they won't take a place that's less than 500square feet or 800 square feet but a lot of renters just don't know what to do with itso for those who really are interested i think

it's a good thing to include but keep in mindthat not everybody will judge just based on that. i took a look at the fill rates for zillowlistings on these attributes and i found that there's a lot of room for improvement. location is great because zillow requiresan address on all of our listings and only 2% don't say the exact address on zillow. pictures are also pretty good but 8% don'thave any pictures and i think it's another 8% have only one picture. those are listings that i've seen rentersjust walk right by.

i know there's a lot of time pressure andgetting listings up feels really important but getting listings up with pictures is usuallybetter than listing with no pictures. floor plans we don't have a way to measureunfortunately, but data available, gosh only i think 88% don't have that field and i thinkthat's a really important thing to specify. pet policy is also blank pretty often andparking is really often blank, laundry as well. this doesn't mean that 74% are blank or nolaundry. it means 74% don't say whether they have laundryat all. square footage is actually pretty often filledout but that's because on zillow we have a

lot of property data so we supplement whatlandlords tell us by adding in what we know about the property and that usually is squarefootage. in general the more information in your rentalad the better. you're going to get a lot of views on yourad but you want to make renters feel comfortable contacting you to find out more about theproperty because they think they know enough that they're interested in it and our databacks us up. when we have more than eight photos on a listing,it gets 35% more leads every single day. when parking is specified, it's 127% moreleads and actually square footage is 238% more leads so some shoppers are really intoit.

one thing to keep in mind is that it couldbe just that the more data there is the more complete the listing is so maybe it's notthe specific data points as much as it is that the listing is just complete overall. i do want to call out a few interesting findings. we actually found than when you specify petpolicy and when you specify data available, you get fewer contacts but i don't think therecommendation then is to not specify. i think the contacts you're missing out onare the contacts from renters for whom your apartment or your house is just not appropriate. so it's folks who have a dog and when theysee that you don't take dogs, they don't contact

you to say "do you take dogs?" at the end of the day you get higher qualityleads when you put this type of information in your listing. if you have flexibility on these fronts, it'sone thing to leave it empty but if you don't have flexibility, definitely specify so thatyou don't waste your time and the renter's time. we have time for one more polling questionon one of the most important topics to enter which is photos in rental listings. aimee: okay, this is a good one.

it's interesting. what prevents you from getting good photosof your rental listings? you can't gain access to the unit; the unitis occupied with someone already; you have pressure to list immediately; or there's somethingelse that prevents you from getting some good photos of your rental listings. i think the photos seem like if you coulddo them you would probably try your hardest to do them so maybe there is one thing inhere. it looks like there is a big one right herewhich is going to be interesting. i'm going to go ahead and close the poll andshare the information.

fifty percent of our audience said that becausethe unit is occupied that really creates a barrier to getting good photos of the rentallistings. seventeen percent said there's a little bitof pressure to list immediately. twenty-eight percent said other so that'sa little bit unknown and then 5% said that they just can't gain access to the unit. carey: yeah. that's about how i was expecting it wouldshake out. you know occupied units are a tricky one. photos definitely don't look great when theunit is occupied, especially if you don't

have much control over the state that it'sin so i guess it's a tough call for the property manager. do you post occupied unit photos or do youpost no photos or do you make sure you have a chance to get in after the folks move outand get photos for the next time that it's going to be on the market? that can be a hard thing to think about whenyou've already moved on to the next property but i would definitely encourage you to dothat. build up a library of photos that you canuse in the future so that the next time you need a photo you've got one from before butof course i know there's often not much time

between tenants either. so recognize how challenging that can be,just want to underscore how big of a difference photos make to how many leads you get. one other thing you guys may encounter islandlords who don't want to disclose the addresses on their properties. usually it's because of security concerns. i don't know about you guys but i haven'tfound that that's always a legitimate issue but i understand where it comes from for thelandlords. one thing to share back to them when you doget that pressure is that the number of leads

you get is substantially higher when you dodisclose the full address. it's six times higher nationally and in somemarkets way more than that, so definitely share this back. people get a little bit annoyed if they seejust the general street that a property is on. they want to be able to look at it on googlestreet view, see what the neighborhood is like and see how well trimmed the hedges areif you know what i mean. more data points definitely help them feelmore comfortable contacting. let's talk a little bit about how to managethe increase that you get.

this is an area where i think there's oftena disconnect between what renters want and what property managers want so a lot of rentalsites make it very easy to submit email leads. what we've found is that that is what peopleoften prefer to do so 67% of renters tell us that they prefer to get in touch by emailrather than picking up the phone. now in my experience they get better responserates when they call than when they email but unfortunately that's their preference. when you're thinking "how do i maximize thereturns i'm getting for this property?" i do think that following the renter's leadas much as possible in the choice of communication method is probably a good idea.

if they email you, to write back and say "pleasecall me" just slows the communication down. it's a good thing to put in your descriptionif you want to say "i prefer phone so please use the phone number instead of email" butto try to switch it from one to another is just . . . . a lot of renters are lookingfor properties while they're at work so they can't always walk away from their work tocall at any point in the day. email can be really helpful if you have somestandard responses you want to store. for example, in my email i've got differentsignature texts set up that include standard responses to certain types of messages i get. you could have one that says "this propertyis available and i am having an open house

saturday at 3:00. please come by if you are interested." or it might say "i have an application onthis property. i'll let you know if that falls through." it makes it a lot faster for you to writeback to email, especially if you're on the go and it means that you'll basically haverenters that are engaged with you in case you do need them later instead of renterswho just haven't heard back from you. i'd love to find out more about what yourpreference is so we can track that to what the renters themselves prefer.

aimee: okay, great. so this is our last poll and the questionis how do you prefer to respond to rental inquiries? phone, email, text, or other. i think the thing about email is always challengingbecause an email is great but then the actual act of once you get the email then you haveto email the person back and by the time their back at their desk it just often prolongsthings in an unfortunate way if they're not kind of striking while that iron is hot especiallyin a competitive market. but it's challenging.

all right, i've got the answers here so i'llgo ahead and share them. so 44% of our audience prefers the phone. forty-nine percent likes email. only 5% want text and 2% said other. okay, so actually it looks like the disconnectbetween renters and landlords and property managers is not as great as i had feared sothat's good news. it sounds like you guys are probably morealigned with preferences than i thought. it was interested to ask about texts becausewe definitely hear all the time that millennials don't write email and that they would preferto text but i was curious how much that would

work with this audience and if property managersare open to text. it sounds like not so much yet. so we'll see how that evolves. i know that in urban markets like new yorkand boston, real estate agents use text a lot for rentals so we'll see if that spreadsto property managers too. maybe in 10 years we'll do this poll and havetotally different results. carey: yeah, i completely agree with aimee. email can be really inefficient. my advice for renters is always pick up thephone and call.

i just want to make sure that my advice toyou guys is also to be flexible. if a renter isn't calling you, sometimes there'sa reason why so see what you can do to keep the conversation going if it has to be overemail. i think that's all that we had to cover todayother than q&a. i just wanted to share in conclusion thatrentals are hot. you guys are definitely in the right industryat this point. rentals are a booming market in the u.s. andyour services are definitely in great need but no matter whether you're in a hot or acold market you still need to be disciplined about managing the rentals funnel and optimizingit at every step and that's the best way for

you to get good returns for landlords. the best way to do that is to keep in mindwhat the rental search process is like. think back to the last time you rented andwhat it would be like for you if you were trying to sort through all of these differentsites and keep that in mind when you're designing your rental ads and then also when you'reresponding to rental inquiries. let's answer a few questions and i think we'llstick with our goal of ending at 11:45 pacific time. one person asked about videos and virtualtours. how are you seeing that as a tactic and doyou have any thoughts on incorporating those?

i think that's a great suggestion and zillowis exploring this area. they can be pretty costly and i think thatwe'll see technology improve so that the price point comes down and i think that's reallyimportant especially when you're thinking about not just large apartment buildings butcondos, townhouses and single-family homes. in a large apartment building, to take a videoof a one-bedroom is a lot more efficient because you might have 50 versions of that one-bedroomin your building but if you've got a single-family house, the cost has to be born over that single-familyhouse. i think as technology gets better and cheaperwe'll see more and more of this, zillow will definitely embrace it, and these will be onthe site.

renters just eat them up. i have seen videos that are so good that icould have rented the place sight unseen and i think we'll see more of that as technologycontinues. aimee: all right, great. then in another question someone wanted toclarify if the vacancy rates you presented included single-family homes and condos. carey: those are u.s. census vacancy ratesand they include all rental units, yes, so not just apartment buildings but apartmentbuildings, condos, single-family homes and you name it.

here's another great question from andy asking"do you think we're heading for a rental bubble?" carey: oh that's a really great question. you know, i don't personally think so. sometimes it does seem like the amount ofconstruction out there is really pretty frantic but so far we haven't seen a mismatch betweensupply and demand. if things were to change dramatically on thedemand side, i wouldn't want to be the guy with the half-built building but we don'tsee any signs that indicate a change is coming any time soon. i think it's a good question though and ithink it's worth remembering that housing

bubbles come in both forms, not just for buyersbut also for renters. another person asked about landscaping andhow important that is as a factor in property attractiveness. carey: oh, yeah. that's another really good question. from what i've seen, renters view landscapingas good aesthetically. they care what the place looks like but honestlythey use it mostly to judge how well maintained the property is so if the landscaping is takencare of they expect that you'll be a responsive property manager and you'll also take careof things that break in the home.

i think it's kind of a hygiene question. you have to do it just to be seen as a goodproperty manager. someone asked one other question about ifthere are any other amenities that you see are in high demand. carey: that's a good question. we've heard a lot about air conditioning recently. in seattle we don't really need air conditioningso it's always funny to us but people are very interested in central ac. i think that's probably gotten more extremeover the past few years.

then there's the difference between in-unitwasher/dryer and in-building. people often feel very strongly about that. the one big change that i've seen lately hasprobably been the increase interest in pet amenities. i think i've seen it more on the supply sidethough where it's almost an arms race going on to see who can have the most outlandishsupport for pets from agility courses to massage parlors. aimee: yeah. pets are a huge rage.

you see them also in hotel rooms. i think it's just a huge part. if you love your pet, it's a part of yourfamily. carey: americans love their pets. aimee: yeah, they do. i have one more that is about kind of aboutthe college market. someone said, "i work in a collegiate rentalmarket. do you have any idea how this data appliesto the college rental market or to the student housing market?"

carey: oh, very interesting. you know it's a different type of rental shopperbecause some of the difference include they're more tech savvy, they're more likely to beon mobile so you're ad needs to be on platforms that include mobile as well as desktop, andthey tend to be very discerning shoppers so they're going to read their description prettycarefully. they're going to have very high standardsbecause they expect you to disclose more information than someone who is a little more mature might. then you've also got another party involved. a lot of times it's not just the student makingthe decision, it's also the parent so while

the student may not care about gated accessand security guards, the parent might so you have to think about both constituents. i think that will change the amenities thatyou present. you know you might not present just game roombut also package service or something like that or the proximity of an emergency roomto the building. aimee: yeah, i think that's actually a greatpoint because we actually in some of our other webinars and even in conversations about hiringthe millennial generation write that the parents are very actively involved in all of the marketingthat you do so i think that's actually a really important point which is considering thoseamenities not just for your renter but for

what their parents are going to be seeingas well. i think that's great. i think the last question we have time foris from a pricing perspective. as people are kind of seeing all of theirmarkets being so hot and their pricing pieces just driving skyrocketing rents across theboard, have you guys found out that there's any kind of breaking point between when aprice is just too high and it's priced out or does the higher price imply that theirrental is better? are there any thoughts on the strategy ofpricing? carey: yeah, it's a really interesting question.

you can have a price that's technically toohigh but you find someone willing to take it. does that mean that the price is not too highbecause somebody was willing to take it? no, it doesn't. it's still not the right value for the propertybut you might get lucky and that's one of the reasons why i think that even in a hotmarket you still need to work really hard to get good exposure and manage those leadsthat you get properly because you can outperform the market. you can deliver better returns for your landlordsthan the market should indicate and in the

hot market when people are confused aboutwhat the right price is because it's changing so fast, you've got even more opportunitiesto do that. one thing to remember though and i think youguys probably all know this instinctively at this point is sometimes when people paymore for a rental they expect more too so there may be differences to consider in thetypes of renters you get at different price points. aimee: right. that's an interesting one. all right, great.

well, we're at our 11:45 mark. i just want to remind everybody that we didrecord this webinar. we'll post it and send out the link. we usually do that really quickly, within24 hours. i want to thank carey so much for this greatpresentation. it was fantastic so thank you so much. carey: my pleasure. aimee: when you guys sign off you'll be askeda couple questions. we always love to hear feedback on the qualityof the webinar.

anything we can learn there is always valuable. like i said before, if you're not in lovewith your current property management software, now is a great time to raise your hand andlet us tell you a little bit more about appfolio because we can help you run a better business. all right, thanks so much everybody and ihope everybody has a great day.