VaultWare Mobile Websites Enhanced for Newest Smartphones

With new smartphone models and updates to mobile operating systems being released seemingly everyday, we proactively test our mobile websites to ensure our customers are providing the best mobile renting experience possible to their potential residents. With more and more phones adopting HTML5 compatibility, we’ve created a newly-redesigned mobile website template that takes advantage of the many of the benefits HTML5 provides.

Beginning October 21st we’ll be rolling out this new enhanced mobile website to all of our customers free-of-charge! As for the old mobile template? It will continue to be served up automatically to older smartphone models that can’t handle the new bells and whistles in the new mobile template. You might say it’s the best of both mobile worlds!

Here are some of the more notable, shiny new features we’re building into your mobile website:

• Mobile Beautification - All of the apartment marketing solutions we make -- online leasing, mobile and property websites, iPad Leasing Tablets to name a few -- are built around one core philosophy, “Make leasing easy.” From larger pictures to easily recognizable icons to slick AJAX navigation, the new design provides a superior mobile renting experience to your customers.

• Custom Buttons - Do you have a third-party mobile site you’d like to link to like RentPayment’s mobile payment portal? We can now add a custom linked button to your mobile website.

• Mobile Management Company Portal - We’ve added city-level search capabilities to the mobile management company portal so locating a property in cities where you have multiple properties is easier for your potential residents.

Check out an example of the new mobile template. We expect everyone to be on the new template by the end of the month. To see a preview of what your property looks like on the new template please contact your Account Manager.

If you would like to learn more about our mobile website solution for apartments connect with a sales representative.

5 Reasons Your Apartment Community Needs a Mobile Website

1. Your Customers Are Already Mobile
   It was just a few years ago that having a website for your property was optional. Today you wouldn’t dream of marketing and leasing apartments without one! More than 57.8 million American consumers (and growing) are accessing the web via mobile devices every day. In the multifamily space, mobile traffic to apartment websites increased 74% per property in the last 6 months alone according to VaultWare mobile site analytics. If you aren’t providing a quality mobile experience to your customers you’re already behind the curve.
2. The Mobile Web Will Surpass Desktop Web Use Within 5 Years
   Mobile web usage is growing at a significantly faster rate than the traditional web with most analysts predicting that in just 5 years mobile web usage will overtake desktop web usage. Quantcast reports that last year the mobile web grew 110%. Are you prepared for more than half of your website users to visit your website on a 3-inch screen? (It’s a good idea to take a minute and check out what your site looks like on your smartphone before reading further.)
3. Balloons and Directionals Can’t Beat GPS
   If you want that apartment hunter down the street to find you, you can try balloons, directionals and sign-spinners, or you can make it easy for them to find you on their Blackberry! Smartphone GPS technology has become an integral piece of the mobile web that your mobile website must take advantage of. From automatically identifying the communities closest to a potential resident’s current location, to turn-by-turn routing and directions, properly implemented GPS features in your mobile website can be an apartment manager’s best friend.
4. Smartphones Are Considered Important Tool in Making Purchasing Decisions
   More and more, consumers are using their mobile devices to aide them in purchasing decisions and to make purchases. A study by AT&T and Demandware Inc. found that almost 1/4 of retail shoppers use their phone while in a store to competitively price shop an item and 60% ranked the ability to check product availability as important to very important. While only 15% of consumers have used their mobile devices to make purchases, the mobile purchasing trend is expected to increase dramatically as mobile network speed, screen resolutions and perhaps most importantly, website usability improve.
5. Google Cares About Mobile
   Google knows the difference between content designed for mobile use and traditional desktop computing. That means that any SEO you are doing for the traditional desktop web isn’t doing much good on the mobile web. If you aren’t presenting mobile optimized content, Google isn’t going to send you any mobile traffic. But rest assured your competitor appreciates the extra traffic you’re giving them!

VaultWare Mobile Websites are a cost-effective and easy-to-implement solution for apartment managers ready to capitalize on the mobile demographic. They work seamlessly with your existing website, are compatible with all major mobile platforms and require little to no development costs. With mobile demand for current apartment availability increasing 73% and mobile apartment reservations increasing by 67% since February 2010, we highly recommend combining the VaultWare Mobile Reservation System with your mobile website and taking advantage of automatic rate updates, industry-leading availability and reservation functionality and centralized content management for your online ads, website, mobile, Craigslist and social media.

Contact VaultWare today to learn more or to schedule an online demo.

Experience the VaultWare Suite at MultifamilyPro's Brainstorming Sessions this Thursday!

Come visit us at T23!

Whether you're in need of a cost-effective Property Website ($25/month!) or you want to try out our revolutionary Leasing Tablet™ for the iPad® for yourself, stop by T23 at Brainstorming this week and get your own test drive of the industry's favorite complete apartment marketing and leasing suite.

Not going to Brainstorming and don't want to miss out? Contact us for your personal webinar today.

VaultWare Content Management System Gets Makeover

Improvements to interface make our centralized CMS easier to use

You spoke and we listened. The result is a more intuitive content manager interface with improvements that make entering and updating your property content easier and more efficient. This single interface can be used to update your property website, mobile website, Leasing Tablet and ILS ads. Simply put, we’ve made it extremely easy for you to update ALL of your online content. Check it out for yourself, but these are some of the highlights:

• Tabbed interface organizes your content and improves accessibility
• Simplified amenity manager with helpful, new views of your data
• The ability to upload multiple images at once

Although the new interface is more intuitive and easier to use, a couple sections can still be a little confusing. But we’ve got you covered. Any time you see this icon: you’re one click away from a short video tutorial that shows you how to use that particular feature.

VaultWare Tracking Site Adds Enhanced Reporting Tools

New reporting engine increases functionality, features and speed

The VaultWare Tracking site is where VaultWare users go to monitor their VaultWare results and track their online marketing efforts. We’ve improved our reporting tool by creating a cleaner interface and adding a few tools to make analyzing your results even easier. We think you’ll enjoy these reporting enhancements:

• Cleaner, easier-to-use interface
• Addition of graphs for visual view of key metrics
• Additional filter options and drill-down capabilities, such as desktop or mobile traffic type
• More exporting options for analysis flexibility and improved printing output
• Ability to run reports for a selected group of properties versus one or all properties
• Dramatically faster report generation

It is likely that you’ll notice your availability session and reservation counts have increased. Part of the power of the new reporting engine, is its ability to more accurately report VaultWare usage. Previously, when the system could not be 100% certain of where to report traffic, it was intentionally excluded which resulted in under-reporting of VaultWare usage. Now, we are able to accurately count all traffic to VaultWare availability, including scenarios such as a user linking from an email or when the referring URL is unknown or does not match exactly what it in our system. To ensure your results are based on consistently accurate data and maintain relative trending and comparison, we’ve reprocessed all of your VaultWare usage data going back to the day we turned VaultWare on for your property.

If you need help accessing your reports on the tracking site, please email VaultWare support or call (480) 905-3670 option 2.

Mid-America Apartment Communities Launches VaultWare Mobile Websites

We're proud to be the technology solution behind Mid-America's new mobile websites.

Each of the company’s 150 apartment communities now has a customized website that is compatible with most smartphones. The sites allow potential renters to check apartment availability in real time, view photos and get door-to-door directions to any community using GPS technology.

"Our new mobile sites offer renters a more localized approach to finding an apartment by providing a unique mobile site for each of our apartment communities," says Melintha Ogle, vice president and director of marketing for MAA. "The mobile sites provide potential renters with optimal search features, which will make the apartment search much more convenient and easier to navigate."

Read the Press Release on MultiHousing News

MHN - Leasing: There's an App for That

Our own Mike Cornell discusses how the VaultWare Leasing Tablet is changing the way on-site leasing professionals tour and close prospective renters in this in-depth look at how the iPad is taking the multifamily industry by storm.

It's already off to a great start, thanks to Realty DataTrust's VaultWare, an apartment marketing and leasing solution offered as an iPad-specific application. The iPad was released just before this year's AIM Conference, and when Lefkovits introduced attendees to his iPad, he was running VaultWare on it. "The folks at VaultWare...constantly had crowds around them looking at the application of this workflow device for leasing," he says.

Via: MultiHousingNews.com

Top Ten VaultWare Powered Apartment Search Websites in Second Quarter 2010

July 14, 2010, Scottsdale, AZ -- Realty DataTrust, maker of the VaultWare™ complete apartment marketing and leasing solution, including the multifamily industry's original online apartment availability and reservation system, today released its quarterly list of the top ten most popular apartment search websites powered by VaultWare during the second quarter of 2010.
The VaultWare apartment reservation system integrates with over 170 websites in the United States to provide rental prospects the ability to find current rental pricing and availability, as well as to hold a specific unit and pre-qualify instantly online. Research shows that checking availability is typically the first step in the rental process after viewing general information about the property.
Since VaultWare began powering online availability and reservations for the apartment industry 7 years ago, over 38,500,000 people have used the system to help them find a new home. On average, over 1 million people per month have used VaultWare to check availability during the last two quarters.
Craigslist topped Rent.com in the second quarter, taking the top position on the ranking for the first time. The classified listing site first broke into the top 10 at the number 6 position in Q3 of 2009. Since then per property availability sessions from Craigslist have increased by an astounding 491%!

Top Ten Most Popular VaultWare Powered Apartment Search Websites – Q2 2010 Based on prospective renters checking apartment availability
Q2 2010 Rank	Q1 2010 Rank	Q2 2009 Rank	Website*	Availability Searches Per Property
1 ↑	1	1	Craigslist.org	232.3
2 ↓	1	1	Rent.com	176.8
3   -	3	3	Apartments.com	154.3
4 ↑	5	4	ForRent.com	97.1
5 ↑	7	NR	Move.com	78.6
6   -	6	9	ApartmentFinder.com	61.3
7 ↓	4	2	4walls.us	57.6
8   -	8	7	ApartmentGuide.com	36.9
9   -	9	10	MyNewPlace.com	24.4
10   -	NR	NR	ApartmentSearch.com	11.7
			Total	964.8

*Rankings are based on the number of times renters check specific apartment availability online per property from the respective website. All websites have a minimum of 200 apartment properties powered by VaultWare.
For more information, visit the VaultWare Online Marketing Index (www.vaultware.com/marketindex) which enables multifamily professionals to benchmark their individual property or their portfolios' online leasing results against industry averages. To see how rental pricing compares by marketplace, visit www.PadZing.com

VaultWare Leasing Tablet

You've heard the buzz around AIM and last week at NAA. Now take a look at the newest way to lease apartments. The VaultWare Leasing Tablet™ is a touch-screen solution that puts all of the vital leasing tools into the hands of the on-site leasing professional on an Apple iPad, tablet PC or similar device.

The VaultWare Leasing Tablet is included in the complete VaultWare online apartment marketing and leasing suite.

Game Changer - You can do magic with VaultWare's Leasing Tablet

Chris Wood of Multifamily Executive talks to multifamily technology observers about Apple's iPad and its impact on how multifamily professionals market and lease apartments.

"Now, all of a sudden, the keyboard and the mouse of the leasing center are gone, and you can literally take the iPad with you to the model unit, to the pool, to the fitness center, and have everything you’ve ever needed and more at your disposal—literally at your touch," Mueller says. "We think it will change the whole paradigm of leasing."

Via: Multifamily Executive: Game Changer