Question about apartment shops that seems so obvious.....

Why don't the MSCs and the apartment management companies get together and remove shopper's names from the property's databases? There are only so many variations of my name i can come up with, and I'm female. The guys have a harder time, I know. Ditto with phone numbers and email addresses. If our names were removed after a shop was approved, this would be a non-issue. I mean surely they can't be worried about losing a prospective customer as the ratio of shoppers to all applicants must be pretty small. Just saying. Sometimes, its the little things.......

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/20/2018 11:43AM by shawnthewoman.

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The MSCs have been begging for this forever, but very few apartment management companies are willing to comply.

Based in MD, near DC
Shopping from the Carolinas to New York
Have video cam; will travel

Poor customer service? Don't get mad; get video.

@walesmaven wrote:

The MSCs have been begging for this forever, but very few apartment management companies are willing to comply.

Does anyone know why? That makes no sense at all.

The clients tell the MSCs that they just cannot be bothered with doing it. Maybe they hope to have a different shopper for every visit to any one of their sites? Who knows. They do not think like shoppers and MSCs think about staffing assignments, I suppose.

Based in MD, near DC
Shopping from the Carolinas to New York
Have video cam; will travel

Poor customer service? Don't get mad; get video.

I'm glad this was brought up. I've wondered about this, too. I haven't done apartment shops yet, but I do the BJ's Warehouse membership shops, and they remove your name right away from the database.

When I worked for a large apartment community, we would go through our database regularly and deleted anyone who had not rented for a certain period after our last follow-up. Granted, this wasn't a "chain" of apartments managed by the same company. The management company owned the complex. But it was easy-peasy to do and not time consuming. If they were to clean up their databases on a regular basis, it shouldn't be a "bother." What business wants useless prospect names on file forever?

I learn something new every day, but not everyday!
I've learned to never trust spell-check or my phone's auto-fill feature.

I don't know, but you should see my list of pseudonyms used for one company in particular. Its huge!

Yes, it would be nice. Many of the property management companies are nationwide and consist of multiple companies acquired over time. Even in the same area, the apartments don’t all use the same database and there often is not a single person who can access everything.
Removing shoppers from databases would require telling apartment managers who to remove, thus outing shoppers. It could be a very time consuming task in some areas. It wouldn’t be long before lists of shoppers were circulating amongst apartments.
Besides, most prospect databases are regularly scrubbed for non-responses.

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Question about apartment shops that seems so obvious.....

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