By Joe Bousquin, Multifamily Editor and Writer

Owners and operators from across the multifamily industry huddled up at the 2009 RealPage User Conference in Dallas July 12-14, determined to map out a game plan for weathering uncertain economic times. Coached by RealPage President Steve Winn, attendees studied the tools and strategies they can deploy to help cut expenses and stem bleeding from falling rents during the nation’s longest recession since World War II.

Using the rough-and-tumble analogy of a football team facing long odds against a brutal opponent, Winn spelled out the grim realities facing apartment owners and operators during the conference’s kick-off keynote. "You’re battling two forces: one, a market that’s in decline almost everywhere, and two, your competitors, who are hungrier, meaner, and nastier than ever before," Winn said.

During the 90-minute presentation, Winn gave a comprehensive analysis of the daily challenges apartment players are grappling with in this market, while presenting possible solutions to help them deal with the current environment. "You’re fighting your banks to produce enough NOI to service your debt," Winn said. "And you’re fighting with your boss to reduce cost, even though you really think you should be spending more money to increase traffic."

Later, in a one-on-one, wide-ranging interview available here, Winn spoke about what those conditions meant for his company, and his customers. "The industry is hunkered down trying to weather this economic turmoil," Winn said. "For a company like RealPage, that means you have to focus on offering those products and services that deliver a return measured in a matter of months, not years. Even six months is probably too long. Three would be better."

Yet, like any good coach trying to rally his team, Winn also tried to inspire hope in conference attendees by highlighting the returns his firm’s new and tested offerings provide. The keynote was peppered with plenty of football footage, good-humored ribbing of RealPage’s top brass, and hundreds of bright orange, inflatable "thundersticks" distributed throughout the audience.

With help from some of his assistant coaches—the seasoned executives Winn has assembled from across the multifamily industry—conference goers got a line-by-line break down of how they could get a leg up on the falling market and their competition. This article spotlights major takeaways from the keynote presentation, while subsequent articles and case studies on this site will offer in-depth coverage of the trends, technology and strategies that emerged from the three-day gathering.

Executive Vice President Dirk Wakeham told attendees how OpsAdvantage, a new offering that’s the result of RealPage’s acquisition of OpsTechnology in 2008, can help small and medium sized players save $16,000 per site per year, simply by bringing half of their maintenance, repair, and operations spend into compliance with a pre-negotiated group purchasing plan—one that gives members a 20 percent discount on everything they buy. On the revenue side, he outlined how the firm’s YieldStar Price Optimizer revenue management application helps avoid cutting prices too much in a dropping economy, while producing 2 to 4 percent premiums in various submarkets. "The loss of potential income, or what you could be charging, is a lot harder to see than a drop in occupancy," Wakeham said. "Most owners don’t have a clear way of recognizing it." With YieldStar, he argued, they do.

Wakeham also reiterated the firm’s strategy of being "Open for Business," a RealPage initiative that makes its underlying code available to other vendors, so that its tools can integrate quickly into any apartment owner’s business, no matter what technology platform the owner runs. He also outlined UDS Direct, a new offering that will let RealPage users mine their own proprietary operating data, in real time, from any computer with an Internet connection. "There’s no need to maintain your own data warehouse or server farm, or to deal with an FTP site or any other complicated technical process," Wakeham said. "And you can export your data to any reporting tool you want."

Executive Vice President Ashley Glover supplied some of the keynote’s biggest numbers. She detailed increased annual revenue collections of $32,000 per property with RealPage’s Velocity Convergent Billing application, as well as $6,000 in annual per property savings netted by the CrossFire Contact Center. Breaking down how uncollected utility bills, late fees, and other small charges add up in a hurry, the former math major let the numbers make the case for convergent billing. Then, she showed attendees how unanswered calls and e-mails result in 30 to 40 percent of most marketing budgets going to waste—a hemorrhage that can be stopped by implementing a contact center. "Both CrossFire and Velocity are proving to be powerful weapons in improving net operating income," she told the audience.

Winn saved the introduction of one of the firm’s most highly-anticipated products for himself. Calling it "the eighth wonder of the multifamily world," he unveiled Peer Watch, a new market analytics tool that culls real-time data from more than 13,000 properties nationally to provide actual rents and occupancy rates in specific submarkets. "For the first time, these are the cold, hard facts that provide the definitive picture of the U.S. apartment market. These facts are not derived from market rates or phone comp studies, but from actual transactions," Winn said. "Do you have any idea how hard this thing was to build?"

Peer Watch provided one of the conference’s most talked-about data points. While the product’s official launch won’t come until this fall, it’s already giving insight into the toughest apartment market ever seen by most pros working today.

For instance, by analyzing actual, signed lease prices at those 13,000 properties, Peer Watch revealed a 5.1 percent premium for renewals in the current market over new leases. Wakeham relayed how attendees could use that data to do battle in today’s grueling apartment game. "Renewal rents have not eroded as new lease rents have, and it’s a myth that you should be aggressively chasing renewals, or extra-cautious about raising renewal rents," Wakeham said. "In fact, you may be leaving money on the table every day by under-pricing renewals."

Winn left attendees with a message for defending themselves in what many consider an offensive rental environment. "Hopefully, we can give you one or two ideas that you can use to create a competitive advantage of your own," he said. "Our objective is to provide you with some secret weapons, or winning plays, to prevail in this economic environment."

Check out the full list of articles to get a glimpse into that playbook.