Business Challenge

The multi-family rental business is highly competitive. UDR continually looks for new ways to attract apartment prospects and keep them by providing high-quality customer service. UDR has made a substantial investment in technology with the goal to improve customer service and reduce costs. Specifically, UDR has a 5-year goal to generate 90% of leases online and process 100% of rent payments electronically.

The company recently re-launched UDR.com to start the process in becoming a fully-transactional website to meet the 5-year goals, utilizing advanced technology for revenue management as well as customer-friendly features such as a residential portal for online service requests.

At the same time, UDR began to evaluate solutions that would boost efficiencies in managing its website content, including technologies that would increase both quantity and quality of sales leads.

Solution Overview

"'Will my furniture fit'? is one of the first questions a prospective renter has when evaluating a property, commented Kevin Danielson, Marketing IS Manager. "It occurred to us that an online room planning tool would deliver a high value to both UDR and our clients by enabling them to qualify whether a property would fit their needs, just by using our website. Customers could use the tool to arrange their furniture in the prospective space, eliminating wasted time spent by both parties evaluating unsuitable properties. It would also help us meet our goals of improved customer service and cost reduction."

UDR learned about the Icovia® interactive room planner from a home furnishings website that used the program to help buyers select furniture and see if it would fit their floorplan. "It was a simple but very effective tool for engaging buyers. None of our competitors were using this technology and we thought it would be a nice, additional capability to differentiate UDR, said Kevin Danielson.

The Icovia® interactive room planner is now included in the profile of every property in UDR’s portfolio – currently about 1,400 floorplans in 240 communities located across the United States. Once a client locates a property, he can click on a "Furniture Arranger" icon which launches the Icovia room planner. Clients can choose from a variety of furniture and styles, modify the dimensions to fit their actual furniture, and arrange the furniture on the floorplan.

Business Benefits

Both quantity and quality of leads has increased since UDR implemented Icovia in July 2007. "Icovia definitely engages the prospective buyer", commented Kevin Danielson. "If a client uses Icovia to arrange furniture in a property, we know he/she is invested. Once they have put the time into seeing if their furniture fits the space plan, they will usually want to save the arrangement, which prompts them to register their details, providing us with a high-quality sales lead."

Steve Street, CEO of Icovia adds,"In the home furnishings industry, where Icovia generates about 30,000 leads per month for our customers, we see a high level of consumer registration due to the fact that they invest a certain amount of labor into evaluating whether their prospective purchase will fit their space. In real estate, use of the Internet to shop for properties is even higher -- according to the National Association of Realtors’ most recent study of home buying trends, 77% of prospective buyers use the internet to search for a home and 24% first learn about the property from the Internet. However, just viewing properties online does not provide qualified details about the prospect, and conversion of these unqualified leads can be frustratingly low. The Icovia space planner is a valuable tool for attracting buyers, but capturing information that will enable the real estate marketer to close the sale."

Bottom Line

Icovia currently generates about 2,000+ interactive floor plan views a month for UDR, and has generated over 10,000 views since being added to the UDR website in July 2007. Icovia also generates over 100 new registered users/leads per month, with over 500 since the launch.