Real estate agens for the Pratt Hill Townhouses on Providence's East Side are showing them off to prospective buyers even as workers continue to finish the condos.
Competition is fierce to lure tenants to newest apartments
With at least 530 upscale apartment, condo and loft units coming on line this year in Providence, sales and marketing is a crucial part in securing tenants.
Effective marketing is what drew Vince McNamara to his future home in one of the Pratt Hill townhouses on Providence’s East Side. He purchased one of the standard units a few weeks ago and will move in July.
“I heard about it through www.riliving.com,” he said. “I get e-mail notifications when properties become available.” He had registered to be notified when there were listings through Residential Properties Ltd., which is managing the townhouses.
McNamara, who works for GTECH, has a history with Residential Properties going back six years, when he moved to Rhode Island from Boston and purchased a condo in the Conrad Building, for which Residential also handles sales and marketing.
“It wasn’t always easy because there was nothing going on here for the first few years,” he said.
“In 1999, I saw an ad for an open house at the Conrad Building in the paper.”
Marketing takes traditional forms – newspapers, magazines, trade publications – and alternative approaches like Web sites, billboards, bus ads and mail to the competition’s residents.
“The marketing is significant,” according to Sally Lapides, president of Residential Properties, which manages sales and marketing for nearly 20 condo and apartment buildings in Greater Providence. “It’s a little like if we build it, they will come. The more we put into marketing, the more it will work.”
“It’s everything. The more marketing we can do and as far in advance as we can, the better,” said Janet Meaney, a senior vice president with Barkan Management Co., which is overseeing sales and marketing for The Foundry’s Promenade Apartments.
Residential Properties’ Web site does the heavy lifting; the site gets more than 2 million hits a month.
“That is a huge marketing tool,” Lapides said. She also has a radio talk show, another element of Residential’s “creative advertising.”
Cornish Associates, which has been developing the Westminster Street Lofts, a group of seven buildings in a two-block area downtown, began with grassroots marketing that has evolved into a multi-phased campaign.
“When the Smith Building opened in 1999 it was very much grass roots; there were ads in the Providence Journal, open houses, lots of word-of-mouth and (listings on) sites like apartments.com,” said Francis X. Scire Jr., director of marketing and retail leasing for Cornish.
“When the other buildings came on line, we realized we needed to brand the property as the Westminster Street Lofts. When you have 36 units to rent … that’s one thing, but when you have 97 units coming on line along with a few vacancies that occur regularly, you really need a thoughtful and carefully planned campaign.”
Residential Properties seems to have something for everyone, from the younger artistic crowd and seasonal city dwellers to first-time buyers, the newly divorced and baby boomers. The company currently has almost 190 units available or coming on line this year. Residential Properties handles marketing and sales for the Pratt Hill townhouses, The Cosmopolitan and Ship Street Lofts, among others.
“We do very specific and different marketing pieces for each, like wrapping a building with signage if it has great visibility, having open houses and cocktail parties to expose the project at the beginning,” Lapides said. “We also do bus shelters and billboards.”
For Barkan, the Middleton, Mass.-based company managing the 223 Promenade Apartments, the strategy is in setting the product apart from the rest.
“The Promenade community stands by itself,” Meaney said. “There is nothing like it. In the city there are lots of restored mills with lofts but nothing of this kind and quality.”
Barkan is looking to attract the supply of corporate and business people within a 50-mile radius and in higher education – faculty and grad students.
“We want to establish a community that appreciates the buildings,” she said. The apartments are slated to open in May, and 20 of the units are already under pre-sales.
Barkan has a sales and leasing office on-site, as well as a director of marketing and leasing for the project, Maryellen King. There are open houses and Foundry tenants often get tours. There are ads in the Providence Journal, in listing magazines and on Barkan’s Web site, as well as with most of the online apartment finders, Meaney said. A banner on the side of the Foundry building has been pulling in 50 percent of the traffic, she said.
Cornish Associates’ approach to marketing features each building as its own entity with an individual marketing strategy, Scire said. In May 2004 Cornish launched its site for the seven buildings and Grant’s Block, www.westminsterstreetlofts.com. In January, a special marketing team was assembled in anticipation of the opening of the Peerless Building in late spring. That building will have 97 units, with six units available in the other buildings, Scire said.
Eastside Commons only has 21 of its 83 condo units left for sale, according to Skip Kelleher, vice president of Toll Brothers’ New England division.
“Fundamentally we’ve really focused on folks from Rhode Island, particularly move-down buyers from the area,” he said. “We haven’t really tried to bring in any people from Boston and other areas.”
AvalonBay Communities, which owns and operates Avalon at Center Place in Providence, considers its trait as being tried-and-true a selling point for its 225 apartments.
“One of our advantages is that we’re very well-established,” said Sarah Mathewson, senior portfolio director for AvalonBay Communities’ Massachusetts and Rhode Island operations.
“We’re not new construction, so there are no kinks, and for some that’s a selling point.”
Avalon at Center Place opened in 1991, and AvalonBay has 17 communities in the Boston metro area and one here.
“We have huge word-of-mouth and occasionally we get brokers, but we only place ads in the paper when we have a lot of units to fill,” she said. The apartment building is 97 percent filled.
Each project is different in the eyes of its developer or marketing team.
“We’re quite confident in our location and the product we’re bringing to the market,” Kelleher said. “Our competition has actually made us appear at a better value than we’d ever had hoped. There is a whole lot of expensive housing out there.”
