| Past Issues | Advertise | www.faahq.org | Multifamily FLORIDA archive | March 2012 |
Campus Apartments’ Residents are Paying Rent using Facebook Connect
Social media and student housing go together like red plastic cups and ping pong balls. Separately they have their own purposes, but together, they function in a whole new way. Campus Apartments and Facebook are the next great duo fulfilling college students’ wildest dreams: paying their rent using Facebook Connect. Connecting tenant accounts (SmartClick) and their Facebook accounts is the latest in a long series of technological advancements designed to keep up with the ever growing demands of the student housing customer. The story actual begins several years ago when the Campus Apartments Information Technology team created CASHPort, a duel platform that is still used today by both employees of the company and residents. The resident portion of CASHPort is called SmartClick. Since its inception, residents have used their SmartClick accounts to view their ledgers and submit work order requests at their own convenience. Later enhancements gave students the ability to designate additional users on the accounts, such as their guarantors, allowing both students and parents to pay rent online using a credit card or by signing up for an ACH withdraw from a checking or savings account. Fast forward to 2010. Smart phones are everywhere, and expectations of convenience are at an all time high. The Campus Apartments IT team launched the next big development: the first mobile application in the student housing industry that allowed residents to use an iPhone or Android mobile phone to pay rent or enter a service request. The free app allowed residents to access their already created SmartClick account in the palm of their hands, giving them access to all of the features in the system. Now, in the first quarter of 2012, the convenience factor is through the roof. The use Facebook Connect (a Facebook product) gives residents the ability to enable one-click access to their SmartClick account from Facebook with a one-time, less than one minute set-up process. Leading the way for Campus Apartments throughout this social media revolution has been John Ailor, Senior Director of Web and Wireless Technologies. "We want to make ourselves available effortlessly 24/7 to our residents. Connecting SmartClick and Facebook makes our already unique, tightly integrated, tenant account portal even easier to use. Nearly all of our residents and many of their parents are on Facebook throughout the day so this was a natural evolution of the portal. Connecting Facebook and SmartClick eliminates the need to remember yet another username and password." The statistics reinforce the need for both the mobile platform and Facebook integration. According to Facebook’s website, in December 2011, there were over 845 million monthly active users, and 483 million active DAILY users. Of the active monthly users, more than 425 million used Facebook mobile products during the month. In the United States alone, there are more than 28 million users over the age of 45, and the 55-64 age group is almost the size of the 13-17 group. Proving that Facebook isn’t just for teens and college students, the user statistics show parents are updating their status too. Luckily for our residents, they don’t have to be friends with their parents on Facebook in order for them to pay their rent. (We expect the ‘thank you’ posts to come flowing in at any moment now.) Already looking forward, future enhancements will allow residents to connect their SmartClick account to other social media sites like Twitter and Google+. It goes without saying that these continual improvements for customer experiences help Campus Apartments stand out from the competition, and for that reason, operations folks like myself give a standing ovation to our technology counterparts for making our jobs a little bit easier. Heather R. Sizemore, CAPS National Director of Residence Life Campus Apartments Campus Apartments, LLC, the oldest and one of the largest privately held student housing companies in the nation, is a leader in the development and management of university affiliated real estate. The company has more than $1.5 billion worth of assets under management with more than 32,000 beds in 25 states. |
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