As a reminder, Fat Property will be closed on New Years day so that our employees can have a day off with their friends and family.

On behalf of Fat Property to all our residents and partners: Here’s to a great 2018!

 

We love our little Winbern property.  Sadly, it’s in a bad shape.  And we face a bit of a chicken and egg problem. We hesitate to spend the effort to get it ready for a renter when we’re not sure if there is a demand for it.  Yet a renter won’t want it in it’s current shape.

Our solution has been to offer anyone that’s been interested a large budget to fix it up in any way that they see fit based on how they’d like to use the building.  Though that hasn’t yet worked as most people looking for a space want something that’s turn key read to go.  So it just sits there as the little-building-that-could until a loving user comes and wants it 🙂

A while ago (we forgot and never shared), Houston Cronicle ran a story about it in a series about intersting properties in our city.  Check it out.

 

From the staff at Fat Property we want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

Our only change in office ours will be closing at 3pm on Friday, December 22nd and we’ll be closed Saturday, December 23rd as well as Monday, December 25th.

If you’re a tenant with a maintenance emergency, you can still call our office and someone will get in touch with our managers for you.

See everyone on Tuesday the 26th!

Our newest property is Riverbrook Apartments.  This 208 unit portfolio of properties is made up of 1-2 bed traditional apartments at 9425 Scott Street.  Behind Scott Street, on Heno, are a few smaller buildings that also contain some 1-2 bed units.

Then, on three different streets behind Heno (Rockingham St, Dawson Ln, and Grassmere St) are about 75 duplexes.  The duplexes are 2 or 3 bed, 1 bath units.  In addition to those duplex units, some of the duplexes were combined into “super units” that are 4 or 6 bed, 2 bath units.

The properties feature an onsite leasing office available to answer any questions you have.  So give them a call to setup your viewing today.  Or email [email protected] and we’ll see that your request makes it over to them.

   

TWO FOR ONE POST!

We were going to wait on posting something about our 10th birthday (which depending on what you use for a ‘start date’ was 07/16/2007) because we wanted to combine our 10th birthday post with a bigger mile stone:  1,000+ units.  We were hoping they’d happen right about the same time but 1,000 units came a few months late.

From our humble beginning with an 8 unit property in Montrose back in 2007, we’ve grown to over 1,000 units.  We’re all very proud of this accomplishment and want to thank all the current and former staff (and residents) that made it happen.  As well as all of our friends and partners who helped us along the way.

So – cheers to 1,000 units and we’ll see you at 2,000!

Plug time:  If you’re looking for a new apartment inside the loop, we have you covered.  Here is a map of where our properties are, and here is where you can apply.  If you’re one of the several people who contact us a day via sites like apartments .com and hotpads .com, we wrote a post on how you can increase your chances of finding a place (ours or from anyone else).  Check it out

PS:  we really wanted to do a highlight of some of the more entertaining before/after during this journey, and some of the more hilarious and hard-to-believe stories.  But ironically, we’re slammed with these new properties (we haven’t even posted about the property that pushed us over the 1,000 number) so it’ll have to wait 🙂

       

Image credit for 10th = Air University.  Sadly I can’t find where the ‘1000’ came from

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