RealFacts keeps chugging along

With the corporate landscape in ruins, amidst the pile of rubble that was once our so called global economy; the RealFacts buggy is still chugging along. We’re still doing what we always do…..collecting and maintaining reliable data. In many ways we are in a better position today than ever before. While our subscriber base isn’t growing at a rate of years past, we are getting a lot more mileage out of our present income.

RealFacts is certainly doing its share in fueling the economy. In this year alone we have invested more in upgrades to RealFacts Online than the past four years combined. Each and every staff member has been treated to a new computer and super sized monitor. In the early part of the year, we installed a new high speed intranet server, built to last for the next five years, we hope. Most of us received new iPhones, even a few iPads. Yet all those improvements combined pale in comparison to the investment we’ve made in our data so far in 2010.

We put a hold on expanding into new markets for 2010 yet somehow managed to deliver a new market anyway (Atlanta). But I digress. The real investment made in 2010 was to our existing database. We’ve contacted and updated nearly 75% of our national owners table. This means addresses, telephone numbers, website addresses and a new point of contact is now available to use for prospecting which we believe will be very important to our clients in the near future. We’ve contacted many thousands of apartment communities to compare our information about their unit mix and square footage for each unit type. And we've offered complimentary quarterly rent trend reports to bribe, excuse me, I meant thank the participants for cooperating with our survey staff. By now there should at least one of our quarterly rent trend reports resting upon every leasing desk in the country. We’ve identified new construction for apartments and failed condo projects now coming online as rentals and have already added those new units to our database.

And as you can see with our first blog, RealFacts has invested in a new website. The concept is to provide a real time experience to visitors and subscribers alike.

And we’ve managed to do all of this without incurring any new debt. In fact we just finished paying off all of our debt and now we are 100% debt free. So you can see that we are in a better position for 2011 as we can apply an even larger share of your subscription dollars right back into the data where it does the most good for us all.

I am excited about this new website as it presents an opportunity for me to share my knowledge about the apartment industry. Perhaps we can all benefit from the countless hours I spend pondering the results from RealFacts apartment database.

Sarah