Even if your apartment complex or other rental property is one of the best in the area, a decent amount of resident turnover is both healthy and expected. As such, attracting new residents to your property is always at the forefront of a property manager’s mind. Below are some effective strategies for enticing new residents to rent at your property.

Superb management

First and foremost, you need to establish an excellent property management team. A team that makes residents feel welcomed, heard and cared for is your most valuable asset in attracting new leaseholders to the complex.

Online reviews

When you have an excellent management team, positive online reviews should come easily. Don’t be afraid to send out automated emails encouraging residents to review your property on your Google Business page, Apartments.com or similar sites. When potential residents are trying to decide between your property and another, positive online reviews could be their deciding factor.

Lease specials & incentives

One thing that can be the deciding factor on whether or not a potential resident chooses your property is the lease specials and incentives you offer for new residents. Many properties will offer 4-8 weeks free, Visa gift cards or other rewards for simply signing a lease. This can greatly reduce moving costs and draw in new residents. You can also advertise “free laundry” by utilizing a FasCard system in your laundry room.

Social media

Potential residents may use social media to get a better sense for your property. By posting frequently on social media, you can show off your property as well as specials and events.

Pet-friendly community

Today, most newer properties have adopted a friendly outlook on pets. Pet parks, dog washing stations, and reasonable pet fees or deposits can help bring in new residents. Consider revising your pet policy if necessary and you’ll expand your pool of potential residents.

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Event marketing

Sponsor or organize fun events in your area and set up a booth where attendees can learn more about your property, get free swag and even schedule a tour. Even if they aren’t in the market for a new place, there is a higher chance they will remember your property when they start their search.

Unique amenities

Unique amenities such as pet parks, spacious 24-hour gyms, large outdoor lounge spaces, card laundry machines that can be controlled via smartphone, private garages or storage spaces, and package lockers can push your property above the rest.

Integrating technology conveniences into your property can reduce costs, save time and give your property additional revenue opportunities. Adding technological enhancements is a great return on investment and will take your property to the next level with current residents and marketing to potential renters. Here are our top ten technology-based amenities to consider adding to your multi-unit property.

Leasing Documents

Reduce paper by putting leasing applications and renewals online and allow your renters to sign documents electronically.

Paying Rent

Allowing online payments makes collecting rent and utilities easy. Give renters the option to set up recurring payments making it easy for on-time payments.

Maintenance Requests

Give renters the ability to put in 24/7 requests for maintenance online and submit pictures if applicable. This reduces the amount of calls coming into the property office and makes it easier for you to manage maintenance priorities.

Keys and Locks

Consider replacing mechanical locks with keyless locks that can be opened with a smartphone. This gives your property better security, makes it easier to change locks when there are resident changes and saves you money by eliminating the need to make and copy keys.

Package Deliveries

Package lockers are electronic lockers used for package deliveries. Adding package lockers saves you the time of receiving and distributing package deliveries and offers your residents a secure delivery place for their packages.

USB Outlets

Almost all of your residents own a smartphone. Adding outlets with USB ports for charging devices provides a convenient, tech-based amenity for your residents.

Thermostats and Lighting

Installing smart, programmable thermostats and light bulbs makes it convenient for your residents to control utilities in their unit from anywhere, at any time and reduces energy costs.

Doorbells

Installing video monitoring doorbells makes it convenient for your residents to answer their door from their smartphone and provides enhanced security for both your residents and your property.

Wi-Fi

Providing a fast, reliable Wi-Fi connection for your residents is a must. Having high speed and reliable internet is probably one of the most important amenities among renters.

Card Laundry Machines

Installing a card payment system in your laundry room gives your residents flexible payment options when doing laundry and allows you remote management of your laundry room. With the addition of a card system, your laundry room can become a great source of additional revenue for your property. CCI’s card payment systems can be controlled with a smartphone making doing laundry quick, easy and stress free for your residents.

Having a common laundry room is an attractive, convenient amenity for your residents and can make your life as a property owner easier. Here are some advantages of having a community laundry room versus laundry machines in each unit, from both the perspective of the laundry user and a property manager.

Benefits of a Laundry Room For Residents and Guests

More Space: Multi-housing units typically don’t have a lot of square footage to spare. The place where laundry machines would go could be used for extra storage or an additional closet.
Less Stress: Renters don’t have to buy, move and connect machines or perform repairs. CCI’s FasCard system takes the hassle out of doing laundry by providing a smartphone app to manage laundry cards, remotely check machine availability, request cycle completion notifications and make mobile wallet payments!
Multiple and Larger Loads: Residents save time by being able to do multiple loads at once in a laundry room versus one at a time in-unit. Also, full size machines might not fit into multi-housing units. With full size machines in a laundry room, renters have the ability to do larger loads and wash bigger items such as bedding.
Saves Money: Residents don’t have to spend money on buying a washer and dryer if it’s not provided by the property, they only have to spend money in the laundry room as needed.

Benefits of a Laundry Room for Property Owners and Managers

Save Money: Having machines in each unit uses more water and energy, which requires more plumbing and electrical setup. Having a laundry room can save you money on utilities, connection requirements, as well as the cost of buying machines for every unit.
Less Maintenance: With in-unit laundry machines comes a greater risk of flooding and water damage, which requires timely repairs. If maintenance is needed in a laundry room, repairs are centrally located, making damage quick to detect and repairs more efficient.
Save Time: CCI’s FasCard system eliminates coin completely and allows you to manage your facility’s laundry room remotely from any smart device. Seeing real-time profits and sales data for each machine without having to collect coins saves you time.
Extra Income: A laundry room can generate additional revenue for your property. By adding card acceptance with CCI’s FasCard system, you can increase profits by selling cycle upgrades, raising vend prices incrementally and growing your community through marketing programs.

Today’s multi-housing laundry rooms look very different than facility laundry rooms of the past. Property managers who are looking to transform their laundry room into a modern amenity for their facility are turning to the FasCard system. Implementing this system into your laundry room gives you the ability to provide your residents with benefits that will bring value to your property and take the stress out of running a laundry room!

Technology has made just about everything in our lives more convenient and that includes the management and use of multi-unit laundry rooms. Having modern amenities in your laundry room such as online monitoring via smartphones and card payment systems will bring value to your property and set your property apart from the competition. As an owner or manager, introducing automated systems into your laundry room will save you time and money and reduce the stress of running a laundry room. In this blog post, we’ll show you how bringing technology into your multi-unit laundry room will turn it into a profitable and valued amenity of your property that is easy to manage.

Remote Management

Installing CCI’s FasCard system in your laundry room gives you the ability to manage cash and collections, provide immediate customer service, configure vend prices, implement marketing programs, run sales reports and monitor the status of equipment – all live and remotely from your smartphone or laptop! Having web-based management means accessing your FasCard system is simple and can be performed from any web browser so you can manage your laundry room at anytime from anywhere. With FasCard you can accept cash payments and resolve problems without having someone physically there. If a tenant or guest has a problem with a machine, you can simply log into their account and refund their money.

Card and Coin Auditing

Using FasCard in your laundry room allows you to audit both coin and card sales on any specific machine. This will give you the ability to not only track the success of your credit card sales but monitor the number of coins in each machine. You can configure FasCard to send you email notifications when coin boxes reach capacity so you collect only when you need to. If you are having someone else collect for you, you can receive an email notification that details the coins collected from each machine once your collector has finished. Having less cash in your machines will reduce theft and you’ll always know at any time how much money is in your laundry room. FasCard isn’t just a card payment system; it introduces a holistic solution to running your laundry room.

Flexible Payment Options

Installing FasCard in your laundry room makes the experience of doing laundry easy, quick and stress free. Whether a customer prefers using currency or credit/debit cards, FasCard provides the ultimate in convenience by accepting all types of payment. Customers can even insert some coins and swipe their card for the balance. By adding card acceptance, you are make it easier for your customers to use your laundry room, encourage more use of your machines and therefore produce more revenue for you. No longer do your residents have to obtain coins and cash or deal with the hassles of coin dispensing equipment. In addition, our F2 Card Reader makes it even easier for your customers to pay for their cycles.

Smartphone App

Residents want to complete their laundry as quickly and efficiently as possible. With FasCard, instead of your consumer having to revolve their schedule around doing laundry, the laundry card system makes it convenient for them to do their laundry and easily fits into their busy schedule. Smartphones play an integral role in our lives and FasCard includes a smartphone app for today’s latest devices. From their smartphone, your customers will be able to create an account, add value, manage loyalty cards, check machine availability, request cycle completion notifications and even start a machine! No longer do your residents have to make unnecessary trips to the laundry room to check the status of machines, sit around and wait for their cycle to complete or risk loss of clothes sitting in the machines for hours.

CCI’s systems will give you the technological tools to create a modern laundry room that is a valuable business, easy to manage, and meets the needs of residents and guests. Our FasCard system is a perfect fit for multi-housing applications such as apartment buildings, hotels, condominium buildings and residence halls. If you’re a property owner or manager looking to get more out of your facility’s laundry room, contact us today to learn more about our FasCard payment solutions and how investing in the technology can take your laundry room to the next level!

Let’s talk about card-op laundry payment

If you’re feeling stuck in a rut; tracking down laundry route operators, dealing with bags filled with dirty quarters, and paying for the maintenance of old coin slot laundry payment systems—it may be time to re-think your laundry payment setup.

Card-operated payment for laundry equipment isn’t a new solution. In fact, the concept has been around for many years. Yet many card-op systems of the past have been clunky, hard-to-manage, and unreliable.

Today, a few of the leading companies in laundry payment management have perfected their payment products for maximum usability, reliability, and ease of use. These state-of-the-art products and services provide valuable benefits to residents and property managers alike.

While there are an untold amount of reasons for switching to a card-op laundry system, if you’re a property manager that currently has all coin-op laundry machines, here are seven benefits to implementing a coinless payment system in your laundry room:

1. Save time, money and gain peace of mind with a hybrid card/coin-operated laundry payment system

Collecting the coins from each machine in your facilities is a time-consuming business. Even if you pay a laundry route to do it, that’s still money out of your pocket. And unfortunately, there are still the security risks that coin-operated machines present, as well as the uncertainty of how much is actually being collected.

Hybrid card-op laundry payment allows you to audit the amount of both coin and card sales in each of your machines. As your money boxes near capacity, you can be alerted by email and schedule the right time to have them emptied.

Plus, with an accurate system of accounting for your machines, you know that your collections are being correctly deposited. Hybrid coin-and-card systems allow you to take the worry and complexity out of dealing entirely with coins alone and save you precious time.

Ready to eliminate coins all together? No problem. The same hybrid coin-and-card equipment can be also configured to accept cards only.

Automate your collections and simplify your laundry room. Turn your two hour routine of collecting every quarter from multiple machines into a smooth five minute detail.

2. You don’t have to buy all new machines, retrofit your current machines to accept cards

Adding a digital card-op laundry payment solution does not always mean you have to replace your existing laundry equipment. In most cases, if your laundry equipment has a computerized timer or utilizes a coin drop rather than a coin slide, they are already compatible with card systems.

Payment retrofitting allows you to turn your existing laundry facilities into lean, card-operated, profit-making machines.

3. Regulate vend price incrementally

Let’s face it, the utilities needed to run a washer and dryer are not free, and gas, water, and electricity prices fluctuate daily. Having the ability to remotely change the vend price based on your utility costs will ensure that your laundry room maintains an ample profit margin.

If you make the move to card-op laundry payment for your machines, you can also stop vending your equipment in 25 cent price increments. Raising your vend prices a few pennies per cycle will have a major impact on your gross sales and often will cost justify the investment in the system in just a short time frame.

4. Access your machines remotely from any internet-enabled device

Payments are received and deposited over the internet for most laundry payment services. You can remotely view sales reports and usage statistics, as well as your systems’ statuses. These features can all be accessed from your mobile device, PC, or Mac computer in your office or at home.

5. Your residents will love it

When’s the last timed you had more than a dollar in quarters in your pocket? Now, vending machines, fast food, and even your cup of coffee, can be paid via plastic.

Many of your residents will be relieved to have the option to pay for their laundry with a debit or credit card. And if some of your residents want to pay with cash, a hybrid card-and-coin-op option with an attendant loyalty card will suit their needs.

Better yet—with the FasCard app, your residents can use their smartphones to pay for their washes and view their machine’s status in real-time from anywhere. They can see which machines are in use and when new ones will become available. And, once they get their laundry started they can ask the system to notify them when their cycles are nearly complete!

6. Eliminate refunds and start equipment remotely

Ever get call from a hostile resident who just lost their quarters in one of your washers or dryers? How much time and money does it cost you to deal with a failed $2.00 wash cycle that’s failed? With cloud-based, connected digital payment systems, you can send a remote start to any machine and resolve a tenant complaint instantly. It only takes one quarter to jam one of your machines—don’t let twenty-five cents cost you hours of productivity.

7. Don’t want to accept credit cards? Try a loyalty card

Adding a card system does not mean you have to accept credit and debit cards. Alternatively, you can distribute what what are referred to as “loyalty cards” and have your tenants add funds to them with cash or through a rent adjustment.

This option eliminates the need to pay merchant processing fees and still gives you the flexibility to manage and control your laundry room. Loyalty cards can be reloaded via a metal kiosk located in the laundry room or in a secure area near your office.

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Managing a multi-housing building isn’t easy. Turn the burden of dealing with your laundry room into a breeze with our premium whitepaper, “Must Know Tips on Managing a Multi-Unit Laundry Room”.

Card Concepts Inc. (CCI) offers high quality card-operated laundry payment solutions through our LaundryCard system, hybrid coin-and-card operated solutions through the FasCard system, and many more options for the self-service laundry industry, including:

Secure touch screen kiosks
Loyalty programs
Marketing resources
Wireless data tracking

Give us a call today at 1 (866) 860-1660 and let our experts tailor fit the best solution for your laundry payment needs.

Coin-op laundry machines: the bane of property managers?

The laundry room is possibly the most essential amenity for residents who live in multi-unit apartment complexes. This is especially so if a property is not equipped with in-unit connections for renters to hook up their own washer and dryers.

Digital card-op laundry and multi-housing facilities

For most multi-housing unit managers, it’s become a tacit habit to look the other way when passing by the laundry room—as it’s often a sigh-inducing sight.

Although laundry rooms are sometimes located in inconvenient places like basements, up several flights of stairs, or nearly off the premises, property managers simply cannot avoid dealing with them. And if your property spans several buildings, you may have many laundry rooms with numerous laundry machines to manage.

Why are laundry facilities such a source of irritation to property managers? To put it briefly, coin-operated laundry machines are a lot of work. They are difficult to deal with, something little always seems to be breaking, they can get clogged up. Maybe the coin-mechanism is jammed, but even when it is working—there’s still collections and maintenance to deal with.

You could certainly take care of this by yourself. Or it could mean delegating those tasks to your super. Or you may have a laundry route operator to take care of your facilities. But that’s another issue: laundry route operators.

Premium Offer: Want to learn more about managing your multi-housing laundry room? Download our free premium whitepaper, Must Know Tips on Managing a Multi-Unit Laundry Room and learn all the tips.

Laundry route services

Landry route operators can be confusing, costly, and troublesome. Let’s break it down: you pay a laundry route service for an operator to come by and maintain your laundry machines and collect the quarters. They service many different apartment complexes and are scheduled to make rounds at set times each week or month. But laundry routes someones don’t run as smoothly as initially promised, especially if you’re dealing with dishonest laundry route operators, and then you’re left holding the bag.

And what if some of your machines require service or collection before the next appointment? You have to wait (and lose out on missed vends) while those machines are down, or you can try to hunt down the laundry route operator yourself, which also means lost time. Coins and physical routes—though they do certainly warrant some merit and convenience for certain tenants—to many property owners, are a vestigial leftover from an older multi-housing economy that did not have to reckon with the digital world.

Leaving the coin-op laundry system behind

Today, many property managers have switched to a better way of managing their laundry machines: digital card-operated laundry payment systems. Since the late 1990s, the popularity of card-op laundry payment facilities has been growing at a substantial rate.

This is no certainly no surprise to multi-housing managers, as it’s a simple process to upgrade or retrofit existing laundry machines to be able to accept debit and credit cards. With card-op or hybrid coin-and-card-op machines, you won’t have to remove physical coinage from each machine one-by-one—transactions are deposited instantaneously into your bank account.

Not only is a card-operated laundry payment system much easier to manage physically, it is also more cost-effective in the absence of a laundry route.

Generating profit substantially by increasing prices incrementally

Card-operated payment systems allow you to increase the prices for laundry services incrementally—at as little as one cent step-ups. These smaller increments, implemented over a longer course, make it easier for residents to budget for than the sudden, dramatic 25 cent increase of traditional coin-op machines.

Residents are also more willing to accept smaller increments—more would pay $1.58 cents to run a load of laundry while many of those same residents would balk a $1.75 cent vending price.

In an article by Multi-Housing News Online, an industry expert acknowledged that,

“Most savvy property managers can make more money from a card system, any large regional property, managed by a knowledgeable business person, will prefer the card.”

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The future, today

Most card-op laundry payment platforms operate online, enabling property owners and mangers to view balances and credits, regulate pricing, and even turn on and turn off laundry machines remotely. Hybrid coin-and-card-op laundry payment systems benefit all types of residents; those who are used to the traditional coin-op payment method and those who would rather just swipe a card.

Whether you are happy with your coin-operated laundry machines, or you want to make the transition to card-operated laundry payment systems, the future of multi-housing laundry units is here, and it cannot be ignored.

Card Concepts Inc. (CCI) is national manufacturer of digital laundry payment products, including FasCard, a hybrid coin-and-card payment system, and Laundry Card, a digital card-operated system. If you would like to learn more about card or coin-and-card-operated payment systems for your laundry facilities, give us a call today at 1 (866) 860-1660.