Right across the street from our newest Winkler portfolio of apartments, located at 8550 Winkler, is Winkler Plaza. A small commercial strip center.  We’re happy to have it part of our family of properties.  If you’re ever in the area stop by and pick up a cold drink from the Winkler Super Mercado or visit any of our fine tenants:  Argo Group, Verbet Industries, Houston ESA, or Criss Cross Commercial.

We’d like to thank Gus Lagos and Nik kapetanakis from Marcus Millichap as well as our friends at Texan bank for helping get this deal done.

(For those counting, we used the word “Winkler” 6 times in this short post 🙂

Another “You asked, we listened”.  As our residents (current and potential) change the way they desire to communicate, we want to make sure we’re quick to react.  It’s why our first response back to inquiry emails we get from online apartment search sites are text (for the full story on how that all works, read our ‘help us help you’ post).

More and more of our potential and current residence are wanting to send us quick chat message via our site to ask us common questions, rather than sending an email and waiting to hear back, or waiting till “business hours”.

We’ve added some initial support for this such as the chat button and the Facebook messenger buttons on the bottom right.  Over the next week or so we’ll clean it up a bit and make sure it’s all dialed in (do you think we really need a button for FB message AND general chat?), but as of this posting, they’re working.  So try them out — you should see some icons on the bottom right of the screen.

Update: We removed the FB chat option as that just opens a chat window on the page that uses Facebook as the medium, while the web based chat does the same thing and you don’t have to be logged into Facebook for it to work.

We’ve gotten some calls from prospective tenants asking if the price they see our apartments listed for is still the correct price. The first time I was asked, I said “Yup“.  But later I started saying “Why do you ask?”   I guess a few properties are raising their prices due to the increase in demand post Harvey

Now I don’t really “blame” them.  Most large corporate ran apartment complexes use sophisticated software that constantly monitors occupancy levels and market area rents and adjusts the price accordingly.  That’s why when you see many large complexes with oddly priced rents like $1,072/month.   And just as airlines raise prices as the plane becomes full, many apartment management software will raise rents as the property becomes full.  So that last airline seat and last apartment unit might be 2x what it was a few customers ago.

Maybe we’re just not as smart as some of those big guys, but we’ve decided to leave our pricing the same as it was last month.  In fact, a few of our properties ran specials last month that we’ve decided to keep in place.   So if you’re renting from a property that has 4 units left or you’re renting the last one, the price will be the same.

So are you ready to rent?  Contact our leasing team and let them know you want a place. Want to see where our properties our?  Check out our map page or go to the “Properties” menu and chose the area you’re interested in.

Image credit to Mike Luckovich

Our staff is taking a well deserved day off for Labor Day but we’ll be back in full swing on Tuesday.  If you’re looking for an apartment and have sent us an email, text, or voice mail we will return it on Tuesday.   If for some reason you’ve contacted us over the weekend or today and you don’t hear back from us on Tuesday, please email our marketing manager

Have a great Labor Day everyone!

 

We get, on average, about 30 inquires a day for apartments.  Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s 1000 a month.   And that’s JUST the inquires that get imported into our lead management tool though sources such as the MLS, apartments.com, hotpads, etc.  It doesn’t count the number of people who call us up from banners, walk into our offices, etc.  Add those in, and conservatively we get about 2000 leads a month (I wish we tracked leads that called or walked in better, using the same tool, but I assume that’s every business owners complain with CRM tool usage).

So, what’s the point of this post?  Simple:  HELP US HELP YOU.   You’re emailing (or otherwise contacting) us because you want an apartment.  And we have an apartment we’d like to rent to you.  So it should be a pretty quick and easy process.  Let’s talk about how we can make that happen.

Click here to read the full “help us help you” post

We have been very very blessed to have sustained minimal damage to the majority of our properties, and are working as hard as possible to repair those units that have been damaged.

 

If you’re an agent looking for a unit for rent for a client, or a if you’re looking for a unit for yourself, give us a call at 832-640-4444 or email us at [email protected].  We have several units that are ready for immediate move in.

 

While many of our empty units will be made available for our any tenants who were flooded (or their immediate friends/family), we’re hopeful we’ll still have plenty left for others effected by Harvey.

About 1/2 of our units are in the midtown/montrose area.  1/4 of our units are in the SE inner loop.  And the other 1/4 are spread out in other (mostly) inner loop neighborhoods.  View our map page for a map of where they’re located.  Or click the properties bar on top and select the area you’re interested in. Our “rentals” page is our attempt at a real time update on what we have (vs. a full list of our properties) though we’re working on making sure we have something available at all properties.

 

We’re offering short term rentals on “ready for move in” units.  And because we know people need help NOW, we’re waiving many of the obstacles that delay a move in and doing whatever we can to help people move in immediately.

 

Finally, if you’re an existing tenant who had damage to your unit, making it inhabitable,  and for some reason haven’t been able to reach your property manager, please email us and we’ll do whatever we can to temporally relocate you.  And if you haven’t gotten the announcement from our staff, we’re happy to help put any family members you may have in front of the line for temporary housing.  Please email [email protected] for more info.

 

Until the roads to our office are clear, and we can be sure our staff will be safe getting to work, the Fat Property offices at 3800 Garrott, as well as several of our onsite leasing offices will be closed.  We will update our page once they open.

Our managers are doing their best to respond to emails, and calls to our office are being routed.  Any missed calls, texts, or emails will be replied to as soon as we can.

Please stay safe out there.

Due to Hurricane Harvey coming in, Fat Property offices will be closed this Saturday.  Our emergency line will still be working if you call into our office.

Please stay safe out there everyone!

A question we get often is “What do you mean by ‘all bills paid’?”  Or “can I opt out and pay my own bills?”

So to help with this common question, we decided to type up a quick article on just what “All Bills Paid” means.   Click here to read

(photo credit: apartmentlocatorok.com)

While we do our best to keep a real time list of units we have available on our rentals page, those listings don’t really show you WHERE in Houston they’re located.  And it can be time consuming to go though the list and copy/paste the address to a map to see if they’re in a location you want to be.

People have said “Can’t you just have a map of your properties?”   So that’s just what we did.

We’ll refine the map over time to have other points of interest.  And to link the properties on this map to our own sites for them where more information can be found.  But for now, this should help people narrow their search