Our Dakota Lofts property in the news

Congrats to our manager Russel, as featured in the story. Below is a link to the Texas Monthly article. To view our Dakota Lofts property page, click or tap here

From the story: “Gonzalez gave me a sneak preview in April at Houston’s Dakota Lofts, first leading me through the lobby he turned into an informal gallery since becoming the building’s manager a few years ago. Hodge was the first artist he invited to show work there.”

Robert Hodge, left, and Russel Gonzalez. Photo credit: Molly Glentzer

A peek behind the curtain… Our most popular listing

We just took over management of a few properties in the museum / midtown area. One of them had a small studio unit. The previous owner listed it for $550 in the past so we decided to honor that pricing. It’s nothing fancy. And it’s small. But it’s in a good area and part of a small 5 unit property.

We received so many inquires on that listing that it actually caused our average total daily inquires to double. Which is crazy given we manage about 1,700 units. At the very end of the week the increase vs. the previous dropped as this unit was taken off the market.

The info below is only capturing people who emailed us via search sites like apartments.com, zillow, har, etc. and does not capture people who saw our listings and called.

In total, in the week it was live, over 100 people inquired about that unit through search sites. I’m proud to note that we responded to each one (the reason I’m proud of that is we hear from prospects all the time that they email listings and never hear from property managers. We make sure everyone gets an email and a text back within 15 minutes, and we normally follow up a few times after that. Here is an old owners blog on the topic).

Even though this listing got a lot of attention, it tracked with our normal response rate of about 20%. Meaning of the 100 people who emailed us about it, only about 20 of them replied to our text/emails back to them (which is no problem as we understand many people are just browsing on those sites and don’t really want to be contacted).

Map improvements

We’ve updated the Fat Property locations map to have a few different layer options. This helps finding a property where you want to live even easier. Now you can turn off layers that you might not be interested in such as our sold properties, or commercial, or single family homes.

Note that while the map page shows all our locations, our rentals page shows the units at our properties that our managers have listed for lease. If you see a property on our map site that isn’t on our rentals page, you’re always welcome to call our team to see when a unit over at the property you want may be coming up.

A friendly Fat Property team member at our Montrose HQ can help you out M-F, 9-5:30

click or tap the image to view a live version of this map

Happy to announce some new properties!

A few of them are in the museum district submarket, so we’ve added that as a menu option when you click or tap the ‘properties’ button on the top of our site. Another of the new properties are in midtown, so we tossed it in that menu section.

We’re happy to add these to our portfolio. It allows us to continue to offer affordable rental options for those looking to be in central areas of town. Rents start at under $800.

“He pauses shaving and he tells himself that he is the bomb
She has her curlers set, her credit cards are paying the funds”

Happy 15th Birthday Colquitt!

As Fat Property celebrates it’s 15th Birthday, we’ll have more and more properties celebrating their own 15th birthday. The first property we bought was on the 2000 block of Branard. That property has since been sold. That leaves 710 Colquitt as the property we’ve owned longer than any other.

CHEERS TO YOU 710 Colquitt! My how time flys….

“Now as I walk down the street, I need a job just to sleep in sheets
Buying food every once in a while, But not enough to purchase a smile”

Bye Hadley… It was fun while it lasted

A little over 5 years ago, we extended our property types from Multifamily to commercial and land. With the purchase of the “Hadley Portfolio” we added a community center (which was in operation as a school at the time), a small office building, a church, a home, and a lot of extra land. All in the up and coming 3rd ward area of Houston. Right in the shadows of downtown.

Soon after the purchase, the person who was running the school (and leasing the church) lost his charter. So he shut down and canceled his lease. We ended up finding a new renter but also made the decision to sell the property. And while we had some ups and downs with potential buyers, we found someone that got passed the finish line.

So Hadly — we’ll miss you. We wish the new buyer the best of luck!

“But people are what they wanna be
They’re not lemmings to the sea
Maybe it’s time you looked at yourself
And stop blaming life on someone else”