WhenI was 22, I bought my first car without my dad's or anyone else's help
in picking it out. It was a 95 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and if I remember
correctly, I think I payed $6800 for it. What I had wanted was a
Pontiac Sunfire, a sporty little car with decent gas mileage and
probably the impact survivability of a grilled cheese sandwich. I was
in heavy amounts of lust with this little car, and it was actually in
my price range of being just a smidgen under 10K. You might wonder
then, just how did I go from Sunfire to Jeep? It had nothing to do
with the price.
When I went to test drive the Sunfire, I
overheard the sales person call me a name. Not the loatheful moniker
of, "Prospect," no, no. This was something much worse. He called me,
"The Commission," In the phrase of, "I don't want to lose the
commission sitting over there." I walked out and left that sporty
little car sitting on the lot, and ever since then, I've lost my love
for Pontiacs. I'm a Jeep girl now, tried and true.
There are
some words you just don't want your future residents to hear you say
and most of them aren't nearly as offensive as my example but they are
all just as effective at NOT closing the lease. When we are working
with a future resident or even a current resident, we have to be ultra
careful not to drop jargon litter. Touring a community while the
leasing agent refers to homes as, "Two bys," or, "Units," or starts
talking about the, "Lease Exposure," like it's something the prospect
should understand is equivocal to the leasing agent dropping trash
across the tour path. It looks awful, your prospects trip all over it,
and it ruins the wonder of what you're trying to rent. It's verbal
curb appeal.
One of the ways, besides great training and brush
up on basics courses, to gaurd against this jargon dropping is
video/audio shops and recorded phone calls. You can catch these slips
in yourself or your team early and correct them before they become a
bad habit that gets ingrained in the way that person does things. Ellis Partners in Mystery Shopping offers both the audio and video shopping options and they are a great company to work with. (I've worked with them on the service end as a mystery shopper and they treated me just wonderful and I always got paid.)
I
asked my colleagues on Twitter what words they encourage their consultants not to use. Below is a short, but in no way totally
complete, list compiled with the help of my friends over at Rainmaker
management (@RMG_Multifamily), Lisa Trosien(@ltrosien), Essex Property Trust (@essexproperties) and MultiFamily Guide (@mfguide). And
on a side note, how cool is it that I can send out less than 140
characters and get some top industry minds to input on my blog?
Twitter ROCKS!
Words to Avoid:
Landlord
Pieces of Traffic
Turns
Non-Renewal
Crime Rate
Complex
Unit
Tenant
Appointment
Work Order (Use Service Request instead)
anything 'per unit'
Commission
And this is just a short list. What words would you add to it with your consultants on site?