The apartment market is booming, but so is the competition. The empty spaces and parking lots near the Route 59 Metra station on the BNSF line have been filling with apartments, condos, townhomes, etc. However, per this report, owners and managers are completely missing the mark as to how important good Internet is to residents with 66% owners\managers responding that Internet is somewhat or very important, while 85% of residents said so. Newer properties are more likely to have better services than older ones if not only because the phone and cable companies have to build new infrastructure there.

Property owners can increase the attractiveness of their property by ensuring high speed services with good support is available. Our 2016 hold times averaged 2:28 with December 2016 down at 1:34. ApartmentList.com reports that AT&T hold times are three and a half minutes, while Comcast is over five and a half minutes. That's over 3.5x that of our hold times! That's also assuming you even need support. We're building out fresh infrastructure that many times has multiple connections to your property for increased reliability. That's something the other guys can't do. The better the Internet, the better the support, the happier your tenants will be.

Let's introduce you to a few other things the big guys can't or won't do. While each property will be a little different as to what's practical to implement, we like to get as much of this into each property that we can. We prefer to supply the power to the in-unit routers from our equipment. That allows for a cleaner installation in the unit and allows us to turn the routers off and back on during troubleshooting. It also leads us to our next preference. We prefer to have batteries supply power to our equipment during power outages. Combined with powering the routers from our equipment, this means that the Internet stays on when the power goes out. You don't have to chew through your mobile data because a storm rolled through. How long the batteries will last will vary for each property. Our routers will also have an available (extra cost) content filter to help control what children can get access to. We certainly can't stop everything, but we can give you some additional tools to help manage the service for your children.

Our preference is a bulk service. In a bulk service we determine our costs to serve the property and approach the owner\manager with a few options consisting of an up-front cost and an on-going cost per unit. We then bill the owner\manager $X times however many units there are. This works out best for all parties except the phone and cable companies. We get a bunch of accounts at once, allowing us to put the bells and whistles on the service that we mentioned above. It costs us far less to serve one location with 200 accounts than to serve 200 single family homes.

We pass that lower cost onto the property owner\manager. They can handle it a multitude of ways. They can pass it along to the residents in the form of extra rent. They can do so at cost to the residents' benefit or at some margin as an incentive to do the deal. The property owner\manager can also eat the cost of the service. This would obviously vary on how competitive the area is and what the existing margin is on the property.

The residents benefit by getting a better Internet service than was available before, likely at a lower price than they could otherwise. The only ones sitting this party out are the phone and cable companies that lost hundreds of customers they had contempt for anyway.

Bulk service also allows us the option of providing property-wide Wi-Fi. Per this report, the top amenity last year was property-wide Wi-Fi. We can ensure that not only do residents get their Internet service in their unit, but that they get it in the stairways, the entry ways, hallways, rec rooms, lobbies, basketball courts, "pet relief areas", etc. This is because we have a contract with the property owner\manager and those additional services are part of the deal.

If this kind of service interests you, please contact us.

Some property owners\managers simply have no interest in getting in the middle of someone's Internet service. That's fine, we can respect that. However, depending on the property, we may still be interested in serving individual customers directly. We obviously can't be as competitive as we could be if we had all of the customers, so prices will be a little higher. It costs us more, so we charge more. Customers still get our great service and support outlined above, just without some of the cost savings. We still try to be less expensive than the cable company.

In these situations we do ask for the appropriate access from the owner\manager to install and house our equipment. We also ask for the power to feed our equipment. In exchange, we typically offer free service to the manager's office to compensate for the space and power we use.

If this kind of service interests you, please contact us.