Six Ways to Improve Property Marketing and Attract Quality Tenants

During the warm summer months as days become longer, many renters – like young professionals or students planning for the fall semester – begin their search for a new apartment. But although summer marks a surge in property rentals, many landlords and property owners often struggle to attract quality tenants.

If you’re looking for ways to make your property more attractive to potential renters this season, consider the following tips and tricks:

• Explore free or inexpensive advertising options with sites such as Craigslist, Rent.com, RentLinx, RentDigs or ShowMeThe Rent.
• BiggerPockets.com recommends that when describing your property in an advertisement, don’t simply list its features – highlight its unique benefits.  For example, a typical ad – “Freshly painted 2-bedroom, 1 ½ bath apartment on Beach Street, dishwasher, washer/dryer, hardwood floors available September 1” – only lists features. Instead, focus on things like the spectacular view or the apartment’s easy access to award-winning schools or that it is just steps from the trendy shopping district in the city.
• Instead of posting static photographs of your property, make it stand out with a 360-degree panoramic tour so that prospective renters can virtually explore each room of your property. If you have an iPhone, you can use a free app like UScapeit. Simply stand in the center of each room, and using your iPhone’s video function, slowly rotate 360-degrees while recording. Upload the video to UScapeit and it is quickly converted into a 360-degree “scape” that you can use in email marketing or share via Facebook.
• Consider allowing pets in your property. Many property management companies no longer allow pets, so being pet-friendly can set you apart and open the door to a huge new group of potential tenants.
• Think about offering a discount if your tenant agrees to sign a multi-year lease – you’ll save money in the long run.
• Be available and approachable, friendly yet professional during every interaction. So many people have landlord horror stories – never underestimate the power of a smile and helpful attitude.

And of course, great maintenance, fair marketing rent pricing and a solid track record with past tenants can also boost your chances of attracting quality tenants.

Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic!

If you go out into the woods today, you’re sure for a big surprise! If you go out in the woods today, you’d better go in a disguise. For every bear that ever there was, will gather there for certain, because today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic!

This Sunday is the official day of the “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” – a great day to grab the kids and their favorite teddy bears and head outside to enjoy a summer picnic together. For parents, babysitters or camp counselors looking for fun ways to celebrate picnic day, check out some ideas below:

• Hold a contest for the “best dressed bear” and ask each child to vote for his or her favorite costume. Even better, invite the kids to dress up like their favorite bears!
• Bake teddy bear-shaped sugar cookies in advance of the picnic and bring icing and colorful candy toppers for the kids to decorate with! Best part – you’re outside already, so clean-up will be a breeze!
• Hold a teddy bear-themed scavenger hunt, using clues from the original Teddy Bear’s Picnic song by Jimmy Kennedy.
• Help your kids create teddy bear puppets out of paper bags and craft supplies and hold a Teddy Bear’s Picnic puppet show.
• Instead of capturing these precious memories with regular photos, try creating panoramic image “scapes” using the free UScapeit app. Here’s a picnic scape to help you get started!

Picnic time for teddy bears, the little teddy bears are having a lovely time today. Watch them, catch them unawares, and see them picnic on their holiday. See them gaily dance about. They love to play and shout and never have any cares. At six o’clock their mommies and daddies will take them home to bed, because they’re tired little teddy bears!

Happy Teddy Bear’s Day!

Fireworks, freedom and the red, white and blue

Times may be tough here in America, but it’s still important to remember that we live in the greatest country on earth.  We often take for granted the freedoms we have that others do not.

With the Fourth of July coming up this weekend, we are hoping to gather as many iPhone, iPad 2 and iPod touch users as we can to help spread the patriotic spirit across our great nation. Take photos, videos, listen to awesome music and be social! We also think this the perfect time to create great images of your favorite patriotic events and American landmarks. Instead of snapping static images, why not trying creating a panoramic image using the free UScapeit app? Scaping not only captures the experience but also makes the viewer feel like they are actually there too. So before the festivities start, grab take your iPhone, iPad 2 or iPod touch. You could scape the White House, the Statue of Liberty, Gettysburg, Bunker Hill or your town’s parade or fireworks display – anywhere that inspires or reminds you of what it means to be an American.

And don’t forget to share your Fourth of July-themed “scapes” with your friends and family on Facebook or via email.

To help spread the patriotic spirit, we’d love to see and share your Fourth of July scapes with our followers – so be sure to mention @UScapeit in your tweets, consider uploading your scapes to the UScapeit Facebook wall, or post the link to blog comments.

Happy Independence Day!

Take your iPhone out to the ball game

It is a GREAT time to be a Boston sports fan.  The Red Sox are red hot in first place, the Bruins are the Stanley Cup Champions and Patriots pre-season games are only two months away…we hope!

Whether you are a Boston sports fan, or from another neck of the woods, you know that physically being at your favorite team’s games is a much cooler experience than watching them on TV. You can’t get the sights, sounds and smells of being there in person from your living room couch – and you sure can’t catch that ball that flies into the stands.

If you’re looking for a way make your friends and family extra jealous that you’re at the game, and they are not,  why not ‘scape’ your next visit to the stadium or ballpark?

If you are an iPhone user, you can use a panoramic app like UScapeit. During the seventh inning stretch, put your peanuts down, stand up, extend your arm and take a short video by slowly panning around the venue. We’re not so sure if this will work so well if you are up in the bleachers, but check out how Jeff Cutler did his ‘Scape’ of Fenway Park.

You can then share the image on Facebook or email so everyone can be jealous that you’re there! Post your ‘scape’ to the UScapeit Facebook wall, tweet the link mentioning @UScapeit, or post the link to blog comments, and we’ll share it with our followers and fellow sports fanatics.

So before you head out the door to your next game, don’t forget your tickets or your iPhone with UScapeit installed.

Five ways to capture your Father’s Day memories

This is YOUR day, Dads!  We hope you have plans to get out and play some golf, go to a game, and be king of the remote control. Whatever you have in store for the weekend, we’d love to see where you end up!   If you are already an iPhone user (a.k.a. “Cool dad”), or maybe a lucky dad who receives an iPhone or iPad 2 as a Father’s Day gift, you should download our free app, UScapeit.

Once you have the app downloaded, all you have to do is take a quick video with your iPhone, iPad 2 or iPod touch (check out the demo), upload the video via the app, and we’ll send you back a 360-degree image from the video you shot.

If you’re wondering what to scape, here are some ideas:

• The 18^th hole
• The ballpark
• Your man cave
• Your favorite watering hole
• Your lawn (only if it puts your neighbors’ lawns to shame)

Don’t forget to share the image via Facebook or email, showing everyone how you spent Father’s Day.

We know Dads rock. You’re your son’s hero, and your daughter’s protector – until they turn 13 and then you are just SO embarrassing. But don’t worry, once they hit their twenties, you are back in their good graces.   So, we hope you enjoy YOUR day and capture the memories with Uscapeit!

Happy Father’s Day from EveryScape!

Scape The Parade!

Can you believe it?  THE BRUINS ARE THE STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS!!!!  It is an awesome feeling to know that in the last six years we’ve been fortunate enough to see each of our Boston teams win it all!  Of course, winning it all means a big celebration parade on the Duck Boats through the streets of Boston. Plans have been finalized to hold the Bruins’ victory parade this Saturday at 11:00 a.m.

Are you planning on going to the parade?  Well, we want to know, and we want you to share the experience of being at the parade in person.  So we’re putting out a call to all iPhone users to “Scape the Parade.”

If you don’t know what that means, all you have to do is download our free iPhone app, UScapeit, then take a short video, panning around the area you’re watching the parade from (try to get that big Cup in the shot!), upload it via the app, and we’ll send you back a 360-degree panoramic image made from your video.

You can then share the image on Facebook or email so everyone (especially Vancouver) can be jealous that Boston has greatest sports teams ever!  Also, please post the “scapes” to the Uscapeit Facebook wall so we can check them out.  Or tweet the link to your scape and mention @UScapeit, and we’ll share it with our followers.

So before you head out the door on Saturday to watch our Stanley Cup Champions roll down the streets of Boston, remember to pack your iPhone with UScapeit installed.

We’re not in Kansas anymore

Last week, less than an hour and a half from EveryScape’s office in Newton, Mass., a category EF-3 (or higher) tornado touched down in the city of Springfield, Mass.  Seeing the images of the devastation is heartbreaking to say the least.  Hundreds of families lost everything.  It was a grim reminder of how Mother Nature can strike when (and where) we least expect her.

The Mass. tornadoes, the Joplin tornado disaster, the Mississippi River flooding, the Arizona wildfires, and NOAA’s prediction for an above-average active Atlantic hurricane season, got us thinking how important it is to be prepared in an emergency situation.  Most people know the basics to have on hand should a disaster strike: water, canned goods, flashlight, blankets, matches, etc.  But how many of us have insurance information on our home and belongings ready to go should they be needed?

EveryScape’s UScapeit iPhone app gives you a quick, easy and free way to document each room of your house or apartment using your iPhone’s video capability.  You simply need to stand in the center of each room with your iPhone, and slowly rotate 360-degrees while recording – then upload the video via the UScapeIt app and we’ll send you back a 360-degree panoramic image of the room.  Watch our demo video for more help.

Once you have “Scaped” the rooms in your home, you should make corresponding lists of the contents in each room, or you can upload the images to services like DocuHome which lets you tag furniture and other belongings in the photos (like tagging friends on Facebook) to keep an organized list of contents and values.  By having the images and lists digital, whether emailed to trusted family members, or backed up online, you don’t have to worry about photos and papers being destroyed.

Your home is the biggest purchase you’ll ever make in your life, and Mother Nature could take it away within seconds.   Even if you’re a renter, your home is full of belongings that your renter’s insurance may be able to replace.  It’s vital that you keep updated records and images of your home’s contents somewhere safe, should an unforeseen disaster occur.  Using UScapeit on your iPhone as an insurance tool, will give you and your family one less thing to worry about when it comes time to rebuild.

Don’t forget to pack your iPhone

Can you believe it’s already June?  Summer is just about here!  The school year is winding down, Father’s Day is fast approaching, summer vacations are being finalized and many of us have plans to be at the ballparks cheering on the “boys of summer”.

There probably aren’t many people who could go the entire summer without snapping hundreds of photos — there’s so much going on!  We wanted to make it possible for you to do more than just take plain old digital photos — we wanted to give you a way to really capture and share the experience of your first time at Fenway Park, or the college campus your daughter just received her degree from, or the beautiful white sand beach you’re sitting on watching your husband try surfing for the first time.

With EveryScape’s UScapeit iPhone app, available free from the app store, we can help you treasure those summer moments by taking a series of quick videos with your iPhone and turning the videos into groups of 360-degree panoramic photos — or “Scapes” as we like to call them — capturing the moment and the experience for you to share seamlessly on Facebook or by email.  We hope you take UScapeit along on all your summer adventures!

App updates

The excitement continues to grow for our UScapeit app. Last week, we released a new version of the app that addressed a few bugs that we discovered after the initial launch…Most of these bugs were related to uploading issues–so if you happened to have an upload failure with the 1.0 release of our app, make sure you download the latest release and try again!

After our new release went live in the app store, some of the powers that be at Apple took notice and promoted our app to one of the New and Noteworthy apps in the App Store as well as one of the “Top Free Apps” in the photography section.

Great news as now even more people can begin creating scapes of places that are important to them!  Great news seems to always be accompanied by small challenges as well–this week’s increase in app downloads has certainly tested our server capacity.  We’re aware that processing times have occasionally been slower than we’d like since this uptick in downloads and we’re continually adding capacity to ensure that you receive your finished scapes quickly.

We have some awesome new features in the works–but we want to hear from you!  What features would help you make the most out of your scapes?

Learnings from Launch

It’s been almost a week since we launched UScapeit at Where 2.0 and on iTunes.  Since then, thousands of users have successfully created scapes.  As we’d like even more users to have success creating scapes on UScapeit, we wanted to share some tips:

1. Rotate the camera in a full 360 degree circle, along its axis (you should be “orbiting” around the camera rather than the camera “orbiting” around you.)

2. This rotation should be slow and steady…A 40 second spin is ideal.

3. The more light you have, the more successful you’ll be.  Outdoors is a great place to attempt your first scape.

Check out this video to learn how the app works:

Have you created a scape yet? Have any tips for creating perfect scapes?