What makes your property feel alive?

Would you agree that people want to live and stay at multifamily properties that feel alive?

I think most of the buildings that we manage were not designed to encourage genuine interactions between the tenants. Do you agree?

What do you do (if anything) to encourage a healthy community? What works (E.g., ice cream socials?)

Constin

Agree 100%. In my opinion, our biggest asset is not granite countertops, or a pretty pool, or a nice gym - it is our residents themselves. Yet we haven't figured out the science/art of truly effective interaction that creates connections between residents. We have a long way to go on that front...

Yes - agree totally. These days people are connected on line in a lot of ways, but that is not the same as building face-to-face relationships. Encouraging residents to interact is one way our leasing teams and our management and maintenance teams can help: providing opportunities to interact. I would love to see big, fun events, but also small things to help faciliate interactions, such as swap events, interactive displays at community mailbox areas and laundry rooms, having kids activities planned and implemented, Zumba classes in the Clubhouse, open access to the Clubhouse for Residents to watch television together, for example. Social isolation is the bane of society - loneliness is a travesty.

Yes, community building! Connecting residents and making them feel like they are a part of something more than just the place they live enhances the building. Parties are great, but some residents are not motivated or comfortable enough to come to a party just for the party’s sake. We have found that sharing and helping each other out is a great way to motivate residents to get engaged, and to enhance the overall community feeling within the building. Sharing and collaboration networks help residents save money when they are looking for things, make money (or good will) with their idle stuff, and gives them a chance to meet their neighbors. All this with the bonus feel-good of helping to enhance the community. Start with a virtual inventory of books, movies, video games, tools, party supplies, etc. and watch it grow! Contact me if you would like to know more about how we do it!

Part of the struggle, I think, is not necessarily that apartment communities don't provide great outlets for residents to get to meet/know each other ... it's that social interaction has changed.

I'd be classified I guess as a "Millenial," and I pay a lot of attention to the differences between, say, my dad's generation and my own. For my dad, whether living in an apartment community or on a street block, he's used to knowing all his neighbors; he makes an effort, in fact, to get to know them, whether it's talking to them on the way up the stairs to overhearing a need and helping to provide for it. When he grew up, he knew everyone on his street and the surrounding neighborhood, because it was considered neighborly to make that effort.

Today it seems like the opposite is true: the most "neighborly" thing someone can do is mind their own business. Plus with so much social "engagement" happening online, less is happening face to face. Simulacra is becoming something of a social norm.

When I lived at my first apartment community (actually one of the properties managed by the company I now work for) we had a CARES Team that hosted awesome events; the community would host great sounding ones, too. But did I ever go? No. Personally, it's because I'm shy and the idea of getting into those social settings sort of terrifies me, ha-ha, but in part it was also because nobody else was going ... because most folks were interested in the free food or laundry, not the free chance to meet a neighbor. The biggest interactions I had with neighbors was when they "invaded my space": my roommate and I forced ourselves to leave our door open to be more welcoming, and one night our three neighboring apartments overheard us karaokeing and invited themselves over for an impromptu jam session with their guitars, drums, etc. The point of sharing that is: It was a social accident, not a set-up scenario, that made us closer.

Maybe the best way to "encourage" neighbor interactions and make our communities more alive is to nurture social accidents. Hosting a viewing party for a big sports event or favorite TV show. Encouraging residents to leave their doors open in summer months. My roommate was devious in her attempts to break my shy shell, even going so far as to tell one of our neighbors I was a great editor so he would ask for my help on a paper and we could become friends, ha-ha! I'm not saying we should be as "devious" as asking two residents to come to our office at the same time just to force them to meet each other ... but happy accidents or "accidents" are sometimes the best way to breathe life into a community where it doesn't yet exist and otherwise forcing it hasn't worked! :woohoo:

I LOVE the idea of creating social accidents! That sounds absolutely fantastic.

To build on what you were saying about how people interact virtually versus in person... Before we started MFI, we started a social networking-based website for the apartment communities themselves to use. The idea was exactly what you mentioned - people are more comfortable first interacting in the safety of their own home, so this gives residents the opportunity to ease into the social landscape, rather than randomly showing up to an apartment party, which is a pretty awkward situation, no matter how social the person is. However, the free Facebook Fan Page option came about the same time, and we got squashed. Unfortunately for this concept, Facebook creates office-to-resident communications, NOT resident-to-resident communications, which is really the point of that type of system. In other words, apartment communities thought they were providing an online social system for their residents, but in reality, they were provided a crippled system that would have a very hard time creating resident-to-resident interactions.

I think there is SO much more to learn about the "science" of social interaction if we want to truly be successful at it!