University of Florida students use the laundry room as a social meeting place.
Lifestyles Communities is totally focused on the Generation Y demographic. The Columbus, Ohio-based developer, owner, and operator of 4,000 apartment and condo units across eight Ohio and Kentucky properties caters almost exclusively to upwardly mobile, recent college grads. Residents typically have just graduated out of a student housing environment where amenities and necessities such as game rooms, computer labs, coffee bars, fitness rooms, and laundry facilities were blended together in great room concepts in which students could live, work, and most importantly, socialize. At Lifestyles Communities, residents enjoy pretty much the same. There are on-site pools, fitness centers, restaurants, bars, and planned social activities. As for the common area laundry room, there isn't one.
“Our renters constantly want to socially activate, so we're doing a lot of event programming: beer tastings, wine tastings, Grey's Anatomy nights, euchre nights, Wii bowling leagues—just a constant schedule of activities,” says Lifestyles director of marketing Tom Roberts. None of those activities, however, involve meeting the resident next door over a spin cycle. “The laundry room is just not where they want to socialize. Laundry is about convenience, and it's done in the privacy of their unit.”
So, like the vast majority of market-rate multifamily firms, Lifestyles has responded to overwhelming resident demand for in-unit washers and dryers with a simple game plan: installing in-unit hookups and outfitting them with machines. According to exclusive research conducted by Parks Associates for the 2008 MULTIFAMILY EXECUTIVE Conference, in-unit laundry is the No. 1 amenity driving renter decisions on where to live. And for developers that fed into a decade-long condo boom, forget it: Buyers want in-unit, or they are out the door. “It's very simple,” explains Manny Gonzalez, a principal for Irvine, Calif.-based design and architectural firm KTGY. “If you've got for-sale multifamily product or market-rate rentals, you're going to have in-unit laundry. There are few exceptions.”
PASS THE DETERGENT
With increasing concern among residents and property owners alike about water and energy consumption, however, the common area laundry room just might make a comeback, albeit with a tricked-out, well-lit, coffee bar-type ambience. If that occurs, expect the trend to be driven by the affordable and seniors housing sides of the industry, where common area laundry facilities continue to thrive.
“Our clubhouses are a central focus point to our senior communities. They are 5,000 [square feet] to 6,000 square feet with a fitness center, business center, and laundry facility,” attests Art May, a senior vice president at Roseville, Calif.-based USA Properties, a market-rate and affordable housing developer with properties in California and Nevada. “Laundry seems to be the excuse to come out and interact. They dump their wash and then stick around the community center.”
In contrast to Gen Y, for the 55-plus market, laundry seems to become a social event, and the laundry room is a neighborhood gathering place much like the mail room. “You wouldn't think of it as being very special, but people have a routine. They go there to meet a certain group of people,” Gonzalez says. “In affordable, laundry generally involves watching kids, so you'll often see adjacent tot lots and line-of-sight play areas. You do your laundry; you watch your kids.”
Turning common area laundry rooms into better resident destinations is becoming more and more the norm, says Mike Stankey, chief operating officer for Plainview, N.Y.-based laundry services provider Coinmach, which has more than 850,000 washers and dryers deployed in apartments, condos, and college dorms across the country. “The more socially activated laundry room is a small but developing trend,” Stankey says. “The newer laundry room is nicer and upscale. It is tiled and well lit, and, in some cases, locked with access. You see a lot of WiFi-enabled laundry rooms, and we're seeing them located around the pools or even around playgrounds.”
WIRED, CLEAN, AND GREEN
Companies such as Coinmach and Waltham, Mass.-based laundry services firm Mac-Gray are also hard at work making laundry rooms environmentally smart and technologically enabled.
Energy-efficient Energy Star and front-load washers are now specified in virtually all new construction and property rehabs, and Internet-enabled machines allow residents to check status and availability of the appliances online before hauling their wash down to the laundry room. Wired machines also report service issues directly to the service company, significantly improving repair cycles and minimizing downtime.
“Connecting common area appliances to the Web enables people to have the convenience and control within their apartment comparable to the in-unit machines,” says Mac-Gray vice president of sales Kevin Fahey. “Card-reading machines, Web-enabled machines—all of the automatic technologies are where the apartment markets are leaning. And then you've got energy efficiency. The demand for it has increased significantly.”
According to a utilities study conducted by the Raleigh, N.C.-based Multi-housing Laundry Association (MLA), apartment communities can, on average, save 330 percent more water—a savings of 8,216 gallons of water per year per unit—by utilizing a common area laundry room instead of in-unit washing machines. In addition to water savings, properties with common area laundry rooms typically consume 500 percent less energy per year than communities with in-unit machines.
Those types of quantifiable green benefits could be used as a selling point to get eco-conscious Gen Yers back into common area laundry rooms. What's more, the MLA study found that 80 percent of residents will utilize on-site laundry if owners and managers provide a common area laundry room.
Gonzalez says the best strategy to follow with common area laundry is to do it right or not do it at all. “There has to be a reason to go to your laundry room over a Laundromat,” he says. “It has to be a safe and creatively interesting environment. Think coffee and e-mail. At any community, there are people who meet regularly in certain community areas. There is a human face-to-face encounter happening.
“Residents are looking for that social outlet, looking for places where things could happen,” Gonzalez continues. “And I think the laundry room can still be one of them.”
Resident Files: Extra Credit
Student housing has the best that common area laundry has to offer, if only kids would give it the old college try.
As one of student housing's largest common area laundry services firms, ASI Campus Laundry Solutions has a special mid-term trick up its sleeve. While students study for exams and prepare to head home for the holidays, ASI will often dial down the amount of cash necessary to do your laundry—sometimes by as much as 50 percent. “The whole idea is to get them to do the wash before they go home,” says ASI president David Goldberg. “It generates more ancillary income, even if we get half of them who would otherwise take it home. And hopefully it increases the satisfaction of the parents.”
As campuses across the country move toward apartment-style, amenity-rich living based on market-rate multifamily communities, the laundry rooms of yore are changing rapidly. Gone are the musty basement rooms lined with coin-operated washers and dryers and a couple of plastic chairs.
“The whole idea of co-locating amenities came out of student housing, and you'll find great room-style common areas where the laundry room is connected to the fitness areas, to the game rooms, to the TV and study areas,” Goldberg says. Typical designs emphasize upholstered, upscale lounge-style seating and lighting like that in a coffee house—if the coffee bar isn't actually co-located as well.
Laundry technologies such as Web-enabled machines for online monitoring and debit card systems to replace rolls of quarters were also born out of the student housing arena, Goldberg says. The latest bells and whistles are mobile applications for Web-enabled laundry machines that text message students the minute their jeans are dry or a washer becomes available for use.
“We're finding adoption of that is slow for some reason, compared to the straight online access,” Goldberg adds. “Perhaps 10 percent of users are using it where available.”
Of course, just getting students to use the laundry room in the first place remains the timeless conundrum for service providers and parents alike. “We're always looking for ways to make it easier for them to do their laundry,” Goldberg laments. “That has eternally been hard to do, other than if we showed up and did the laundry for them.”