UDR, Inc. (NYSE: UDR) announced today that over 1 million unique visitors went to its website in the first nine months of 2007, reaching the million visitor milestone three months earlier than in 2006. Nearly 50% of the visits were the result of organic search engine referrals at no marketing cost to UDR, Inc. In July 2007, UDR launched a redesigned web site using new, customer centric web technology. Web visitor count accelerated following this launch, and in September alone, over 105,000 apartment shoppers visited UDR communities at UDR.com to learn about community amenities and rental rates as well as apply and reserve an apartment home.
"More and more prospective residents are using the internet to shop for and rent apartments," stated Martha Carlin, Executive Vice President, Property Operations. "Nearly 40% of our third quarter leasing was done via the internet, up from 29% last year. Our goal is to obtain and process 90% of our leases on the Internet. We continue to implement innovative changes to maintain our leadership in this area and focus on ways to make doing business with us easy for our customers."
In early November, UDR, Inc. plans to launch a new Spanish-language site, designed to open the company's door to Latino Americans, the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group. The site will be found at es.udr.com. "The Hispanic market represents a rapidly growing renter base in many major city locations and we want to provide the proper site experience and features to assist these prospects to gain easy access to UDR apartment information," said Carlin. "According to the 2000 census figures, minorities represented 31 percent of the nation's population, up from 24 percent in 1990."
The Spanish site, which is unique within the multi-family housing industry, will offer over 4,000 Spanish translated web pages and include apartments for rent search resources. It will feature side-by-side apartment comparison shopping, last community viewed navigation, RSS feeds, and the ability to reserve an apartment online. In addition, UDR Spanish language content will also be found on any web-enabled mobile device.
Source: Business Wire