Adrian Harrell here with New Bridge Management. If you watch the video above, you’ll see that I was out of the office recently in San Diego’s beautiful Silver Strand Beach; one of my favorite places in the world. As a graduate student here in San Diego, I used to come down here every day at 3 o’clock boogie-board in hand, and enjoy the Sun surf and the beach and the life.
The reason I was in San Diego is for the National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) conference that happened last week. The week before I was in Long Beach at the California Association of Realtors conference. I have been spending a lot of time going to conferences to better educate myself and my team so that we can provide the best services we can to our clients and our tenants.
While I was in Long Beach, I learned from the California Association of Realtors that homeownership in the state of California today is at 54.3%. By the year 2025, the rate is likely to drop to 41%, meaning that the majority of the state’s single-family homes will be occupied by renters. That’s important for property owners and property managers to know as we move forward and try to learn what tenants are looking for and what they need.
While at the NARPM conference, I learned that the fastest growing segment of renters are millennials and baby boomers. When these groups were surveyed, data showed that both groups are looking for empathy, customer service, and technology when dealing with property management. While 74% of Millennials welcome and utilize technology in their daily lives, only 62% of baby boomers feel this way. This was surprising to me because I thought that baby boomers numbers would be much lower.
While in San Diego, I also met up with two of our favorite partners – AppFolio and Fourandhalf. Appfolio is a great company that helps us utilize technology by providing online access to our tenants as well as our clients. Using Appfolio, tenants can pay rent online, and submit work orders; owners and clients can get financial information for their assets and their real estate portfolio.
Fourandhalf, our digital marketing partner, is a great company we’ve been working with for a number of years. This is a shout-out to my friend and Account Manager, Brittany. She’s always pushing me to think outside the box and really consider what people are looking for when watching educational content relating to the property management industry. Because of this, I decided while I was in San Diego, I would take the opportunity to go ahead and record a video blog.
I learned a lot at both the California Association of Realtors and NARPM conferences and I am looking forward to returning to the office fully recharged with this new information in hand. If any of these topics interest you or if you care to discuss more with me, please contact us at New Bridge Management!
