We were recently invited to attend and present at Seward Park’s Green Day which featured area businesses coming together to create a greener community for Seward Park Co-op, one of the largest co-op’s in New York City with 1,700 residential units. The night was filled with excellent speakers from Hertz Connect and their Car Sharing Program as well as various community organizations like the Seward Park Community Garden and the new LES Food Co-op. Michael Tuminia, the board president of Seward Park, gave the opening remarks where he touched base on how much paper Seward Park would be saving each year by using their new website powered by MyBuilding.org. Paper consumption would be reduced by an estimated 75,000 pieces of paper per year! To read more about the evening, check out the article in The Lo-Down.

We've all heard the "Go Green" craze recently, and we know that we should reduce, reuse, and recycle, but what we really want to know is how going green can actually benefit me? As a building manager, you can save A LOT of money by reducing your paper usage. If you really think about it, how much paper does your building use on a daily basis? Leasing agreements, contracts, resident requests, notifications to residents, etc. The list is endless, but if you reduce just a little, you may be able to really cut some costs. Just to put it into perspective, read the excerpt below from reduce.org and you'll see that the cost of using all that paper is shocking!

Economical: Saving paper saves money

You're probably thinking, "What's the big deal? My office doesn't spend much on paper." But what most people don't realize is that the cost of buying paper is just the tip of the paper iceberg. For each sheet of paper used, a company incurs not only purchasing costs, but also storage, copying, printing, postage, disposal, and recycling—and it adds up. A recent Minnesota study estimates that associated paper costs could be as much as 31 times the purchasing costs (not including labor). So, that ream of paper that you paid $5 for really could cost up to $155!


With the mybuiling.org portals, you can reduce your building's paper usage by using features such as online maintenance requests, the payments center, and email communication to both staff members and residents. Not only is this helping you save money, but you get to feel good about helping the environment too!

If you operate a rental building, you know how crucial it is to keep your residents coming back in order to avoid vacancies, especially in this economy. In this article from UNITS Magazine there are a wealth of ideas and tips to help you retain your residents and ensure that they are excited to be living in your building. Many of these tips could also be used to help condos increase resident satisfaction.

The MyBuilding.org online service can help you accomplish many of these tips, but here are a few that caught our eye:

Dear Manager,

We hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday. We realize how busy this season is for you and understand the importance of being able to properly and effectively communicate with residents. In this regard, we are pleased to announce significant upgrades to the Lobby Display Screen (LDS).

We believe that the LDS' prominence in the lobby/mailroom area and its continuous connection to your MyBuilding.org-powered resident portal can be leveraged way beyond just displaying packages and scrolling announcements.

The LDS can serve as a communication hub, delivering fresh rotating content from the resident portal, including neighborhood and building events and discounts. It can also serve as an internal marketing tool for you to deliver important messages to residents, such as encouraging them to use the portal to submit requests. The LDS is particularly useful for communicating with residents that haven't had a chance yet to register with the service or don't own a computer.

Now from your Manager's Console, under the Communications and Content tab, you can configure the LDS to choose from a selection of informative slides that encourage residents to take advantage of powerful features available with the service. It can also present useful information from the residents portal, such as events from the community calendar, and neighborhood discounts. This content automatically rotates every time the LDS refreshes, at the pace of your choice.

Coming soon: Request custom slides to rotate on your LDS.

Dear Manager,

We hope you are enjoying the summer. We want to thank many of our clients that participated in our customer feedback project. Your direct input is instrumental to our continuous effort to improve the service. We will soon announce what changes we've made based on your feedback. We are pleased to announce the release of a series of feature and enhancements such as the Manager's Console's new interface, the monitored Entry Log, Residents In Arrears, and more.

We are great believers in the value of fostering a vibrant community to enhance retention in rental communities and value in condos. Our upcoming release of the automated weekly/monthly newsletter will be a central tool for this, as well as tight integration with Facebook and Twitter.

Great news for all our iPhone users - a MyBuilding.org iPhone application - coming soon!