Here is a thought exercise:  Do you think your community would be positively impacted if Chris Pratt or Jennifer Lawrence lived there?  What if you could advertise that?

Here is my take:  Just like how famous stars get goodie bags of tons of free stuff, with companies hoping they will use (and showcase) their product, it would be an absolute boon to have a celebrity live at one of our properties.  Of course, the challenge is that they often own their own home, so the opportunities are not that plentiful.  But if it did happen, and it was publicized, then the value to that community would be absolutely huge.  (Let's not worry about privacy concerns quite yet)  And just like giving away a goodie bag, it would make sense to incentivize the celebrity to live at the community, with discounted rent to some degree.

But since inspiring Chris Pratt or Jennifer Lawrence to live at one of our communities is likely off the table, what if we looked at the idea, just notched down a few pegs?  In the social media world, we talk about finding out who the "influencers" are, and engaging with them.  And it's true, everyday people are now using social media, youtube, etc to create VAST audiences of millions of people, even turning that fame into book deals.  Taking it to a local level, there are surely people who are influencers in that particular market who have a valuable audience.  So you have these people, who many still likely live in apartments, but have a strong following within that niche/market.

So here is the question:  Does it make sense to incentivize them to stay at your community? 

Last week, I was watching an episode of Black Mirror, and they delved into that exact concept.  In the episode, each person had a rating based upon interactions with others.  The higher the rating, the more influence they had.  And in that episode, the main character is looking at an apartment which she couldn't afford, but they had a Prime Influencers program where those with a rating of 4.5 or higher got 20% off their rent!

Now granted, the episode wasn't glorifying this at all - in fact, it was a pretty negative take on the idea that everyone had a rating, so the writers were clearly not thinking that some sort of discount for influencers was actually a good idea.  That said, does it make sense in some way in a non-dystopian scenario?  Could a community actually inspire "influencers" to live at their property that would ultimately drive demand and rents?   

Image Source:  Minglemediatv