Kamson Corporation has deployed Property Centric's local search engine technology at the web sites of 14 of its apartment communities located throughout southern New Jersey, greater Philadelphia and Bucks County, PA. Specifically, as part of a firm-wide initiative to more aggressively leverage the web as a leasing and ancillary revenue tool, Kamson is the first multifamily owner/property manager in the eastern U.S. to introduce a local search engine on its community web sites that allows tenants and other area residents to perform searches for local goods and services that fall into as many as 120 of the most popular search categories.
According to Kamson Executive Vice President Mike Beirne, "Like the hospitality and airline industries, the property management industry recognizes that the web has evolved well beyond a mere 'vanity play' to become a strategic business tool. We are now increasingly reliant on the web for resident communications, marketing and leasing activity. Property Centric's proprietary platform provided us with a unique and powerful amenity that will not only increase traffic at our apartment community web sites among our residents, but also among those living within those regions who may be looking for an apartment as part of their next move."
According to Kelsey Group, which provides research, data and strategic analysis on directories, small-business advertising and online local media, 70% of U.S. households go online to find local businesses.
"By offering site visitors a useful local search feature, our technology will help make Kamson's web sites an Internet destination for renters, prospective renters, and area residents alike which will, over time, help bolster the company's natural search engine rankings on the global engines such as Yahoo and Google," explained Property Centric President Rob Remus. "This means Kamson can ultimately recoup monies traditionally used for paid placement month after month, and their community web sites in those test areas will be ranked higher with every search for a local business or service provider."
"In addition to search engine optimization (SEO), incorporating a local search engine on our community web sites will allow us to further build our brand name recognition within the region as they become authoritative destinations for information about the regions we serve," said Beirne.
Property Centric's local search engine also offers Kamson the ability to generate ancillary revenue from local businesses that pay for placement within its search results or for banner ads on search results pages, a benefit that the global search engines do not offer.
Beirne, who recently authored The Property Management Toolkit published by the American Management Association, also noted, "Property Centric's industry-leading technology takes a global medium and drills it down to a local level where it can most effectively be resourced. The company also played a key role in helping us build our Internet marketing strategy in new directions from concept development through deployment and all the way to resident communications."
Source: PRweb.com