By Joe Bousquin, Multifamily Editor and Writer

When more than 600 apartment industry professionals gathered at the Dallas Hilton Anatol for the 2009 RealPage User Conference July 12-14, it was during the country’s longest recession since World War II. With rents and occupancy rates deteriorating nationally, these multifamily pros came looking for answers and tactics that would help them weather the storm, or even come out stronger on the other side.

During the conference’s keynote presentation, RealPage CEO Steve Winn told attendees he hoped they could gain some insight into what’s happening in the apartment sector today, and develop strategies to deal with those conditions. "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."

Following the conference, four attendees shared their insights on the trends, industry discussions, and new concepts that caught their attention during those three days in Dallas. These are the takeaways they brought home with them.

Q: What lessons or ideas made the biggest impression on you at the 2009 RealPage User Conference?

Alison Hall, Director, Camden Contact Center, Camden Property Trust:
At Camden, we’re always looking for new ideas to bring back from the RealPage User Conference. In fact, each year when we return from this meeting, we get together at headquarters and debrief on what we all saw.

In general, coming from an operations background, the RealPage User Conference gets me up to speed in three days, and that’s a valuable education. It’s not just about the technology and what’s going on with RealPage; it gives you a view to what’s going on in the industry in general.

Those three days of education take me from having to figure out things for myself in isolation, to actually having a plan and a direction by the end of the conference. To me, that’s the real value.

As for my favorite sessions, there was a presentation called "Building Your Online Corporate Mullet," which was about using social media as a marketing tool to increase your prospects’ awareness of your brand. I got a lot of good ideas there.

But one of my biggest takeaways this year was the presentation on 3-D floor plans. When Michael Munoz explained that having 3-D floor plans on your Web site can quadruple the amount of time visitors spend on your page, that made a big impact on me. As director of our contact center, my focus is on ensuring that the phone continues to ring. Having 3-D floor plans for our Web site seems like a very compelling way to do that.

I don’t know how the technology works yet, or how much it costs, but I do know one thing: I’m going to keep dancing on someone’s desk until we get it.

Pam Smith, Vice President of Accounting, Stonemark Management:
We are very, very interested in OpsTechnology and the OpsAdvantage application that was introduced at the User Conference.

The aspects that really got my attention were the compliance and cost controls you get with something like OpsTechnology. It really seems like by having that type of application in place, you’ve got another layer of compliance that makes it harder for your on-site staff to get around.

We already use Velocity for convergent billing of residents and utility invoice processing for our internal accounts payable. We’re looking very hard at these purchase-order kinds of applications to help complete the cycle.

Chris Long, Director of Pricing and Revenue Management, UDR:
One aspect that really stood out for me was how much more customer-focused we all have to be in today’s environment.

At UDR, we want to be the easiest company possible for our residents to do business with. That’s where you’re going to have success today. One way to do that is by having a consistent, integrated platform that allows you to interact with those customers. RealPage offers a lot of products that help you do that. That was definitely a central message for me.

As far as specific applications go, I’ve been waiting for a product like PeerWatch, the market analysis tool Jeffrey Roper talked about, for a long time. The really compelling thing is that it looks at actual leasing data from thousands of properties, and not just availability information in a given submarket.

When you can see that the rest of the market is off seven percent, and you’re only down five percent, it gives you the ability to say being down five percent is a good thing.

It will also be a lot easier to analyze potential deals and find potential opportunities. Even for the analyst community, it has potential to give visibility into what’s going on out there.

Having that kind of visibility, I think, is going to change the industry quite a bit. Today, we don’t have a good way to see that information, because data in the multifamily business has always been trailing. PeerWatch brings this new element that allows you to see real pricing, in real time. I think that has the potential to be very powerful.

Mark Gluskin, Chief Financial Officer, Sherman Residential:
I liked the fact that the conference wasn’t just a sales pitch. One day was devoted to RealPage’s products, of course, but the second day was devoted more to industry discussion, and that was really valuable for me.

For instance, one area that we’re looking at internally is online advertising versus the more traditional, apartment guide kind of ads. It was interesting to hear how our peers are approaching their own marketing priorities.

As far as the products themselves went, I was really focused on learning more about OpsAdvantage. We’ve been an OpsTechnology customer for several years, so that was really my connection in coming to the RealPage User Conference this year. [Ed.’s note: RealPage acquired OpsTechnology in 2008.] In fact, we use Yardi as our general ledger and real estate software. But looking at the new OpsAdvantage application, and the ability to have an in-house purchasing program, was really compelling.

Between OpsAdvantage on the purchase-order side, and the invoicing capabilities that come with it, I saw some exciting new possibilities. Beyond that, it was just great to see new products that may make sense for us as we continue to grow.