Chicago-based ILS Apartments.com is one of the latest entrants to multifamily mobile: Its iPhone/iPod Touch application (app) launched on July 6 and features walk-through videos, photos, floor plans, and integrated mapping as part of a location-based search of millions of apartment units. The app is expected to see roughly 20,000 downloads in its first 30 days of availability on Apple’s Apps Store.
“We are exceeding our expectations,” says Apartments.com vice president of product management Chris Brown. “We are at a 500 to 600 downloads-per-day pace. These devices are getting more and more powerful; they are getting faster; and they are getting more ubiquitous. It is just a matter of time until really a lot of the core computing that people are doing today happens on mobile devices.”
Denver-based REIT UDR was one of the first companies in the industry to launch an iPhone-compatible Web site that, along with the company’s WAP Web site, is the only mobile Web site in the world that has an online apartment reservations/hold mechanism. How does it all add up? “Today, we are realizing incremental mobile lead generation and sales growth at a lower cost of acquisition and lower cost of sales than through other Internet sources,” says UDR vice president of sales and marketing Steve Taraborelli. “It’s also cheaper and quantitatively much easier to track than social media efforts.” Next up for UDR is a project with Scottsdale, Ariz.-based RealtyData Trust to build a mobile application enabling monetary transactions for apartment reservations.
