Five Reasons Why Unit Amenities May Be Harder Than You Think

Last week, we talked about how unit amenity pricing is the most common place to uncover hidden NOI in multifamily rental operations, and we covered the various reasons why amenity opportunities present themselves.
Unit amenities are a simple concept, at least in theory.  However, experience shows that the practice is a lot more challenging. So, let’s explore a few of the reasons that finding missing amenities is more difficult in practice than in theory.
1. It takes a concerted effort. Finding missing amenities is not like finding trash along the tour path. Associates must make must review and understand the configuration of the PMS and purposefully evaluate that against what they see in the property. It takes a combination of looking at site maps, Google maps and physically visiting buildings and units. It’s rare that one just stumbles upon the obvious.
2. The sheer volume of amenities can be challenging. It’s not unusual for a community to have 20 or more amenity codes, and there are rarely fewer than 10. Since it’s typical for multiple amenities to be associated with individual units (e.g., finishes, flooring, floor, views, location, etc.), associates are managing hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of distinct unit-amenity combinations. That’s a lot to manage without some specific tools to help.
3. Bundling of amenities complicates things. Associates can’t just look at a list of units and total amenity values since each unit represents an almost-unique bundle of amenities. For example, if a balcony amenity is present in units 102 and 302 but missing from 202, we know we need……