Luxury apartment owner and operator Archstone wanted to create a better, faster, and more consistent way for its leasing agents to work with—and close leases with—prospective residents. The need was most acute when Archstone was leasing units in buildings under construction, which made on-site tours difficult. The company found a solution: self-service kiosks in sales offices that run a highly visual and interactive solution built with Microsoft® technologies including Visual Studio® Team System 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. The kiosks have improved the customer experience, reduced the time required to close, and contributed to an increase in occupancy upon opening for the company’s newest apartment development. Archstone developed the solution in half the time that it would have taken using other technologies, and the company anticipates extending the solution to the Web.

Situation

Try leasing luxury apartments in a tough economic climate.

We needed a great-looking application, we needed it quickly, and Microsoft technologies made that possible. Gary Taylor Director of Application Development, Archstone

It’s not easy, but Archstone manages to do it—and to do it very well. Archstone is one of the largest residential real-estate organizations in the United States, developing and operating properties in the most desirable neighborhoods in the nation. Its communities reside in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Boston, and other locations.

Traditionally, the process of leasing apartments involves glossy brochures and a personalized tour in which a leasing agent takes a prospective renter through apartments of interest. The generally affluent clients considering the company’s apartments expect a high level of personal service from the leasing agents. It is a time-consuming process—given the high labor requirement—with little opportunity for improving productivity. Because the apartments in question can rent for thousands of dollars per month, however, Archstone considers the investment in personal service necessary and appropriate.

Nevertheless, Archstone had other concerns. For example, there was no way to ensure that all of the leasing agents for a given building were providing the same information and delivering a consistent marketing message to prospective residents.

Even more significantly, the process was better suited to the leasing of apartments in existing buildings, through which agents could conduct personalized tours. As Archstone expands the pace of its construction of new buildings, it faces an increasing need to lease units even before their construction is complete and available for tours.

Solution

Archstone is meeting that need thanks to a highly visual and interactive technology display called the Floor Plan Visualizer. The Floor Plan Visualizer enables leasing agents and their customers to sit together in front of 24-inch and 42-inch touchscreens that provide views of simulations and floor plans of specific apartments, as well as up to-the-minute information about pricing and availability, a building’s amenities, location, and neighborhood features. The high-resolution touchscreen renders the images with a clarity that agents say is the next best thing to being in the actual apartments.

“Given the market for our apartments, we needed a solution with a real ‘wow factor’ to impress highly sophisticated prospective residents,” says Gary Taylor, Director of Application Development, Archstone.

Figure 1. The Floor Plan Visualizer

Taylor and his colleagues knew that they wouldn’t find an off-the-shelf solution to meet their highly customized needs, which meant that they would have to develop—or commission—the solution themselves. That gave them a choice of technologies. Although one of the company’s properties had built a solution with Flash, Archstone chose Microsoft® technologies—in particular, Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 and Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5—for the solution that it plans to roll out to new properties.

Archstone chose Microsoft, according to Michael Bass, Lead Solutions Architect at Archstone, for several reasons. The development team saw the opportunity to take advantage of Microsoft technologies such as Windows® Presentation Foundation in the .NET Framework. Built to use the latest graphics hardware, Windows Presentation Foundation gives developers an easy, consistent way to integrate a host of rich features, such as 2-D and 3-D graphics, advanced typography, animation, audio, video, and more, into their applications.

The Archstone development team used Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite, which gave the developers creating the solution the full range of tools they needed in a single, integrated development environment. The team also used Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, which is used for source control, build automation, and work-item tracking.

The use of Microsoft technologies made it easy for Archstone to use the Web services that it had already created for other purposes to pull information from the company’s back-end systems, including its property management system, which runs on Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software.

Information from that system integrates with the Floor Plan Visualizer to inform leasing agents and prospective residents whether a particular apartment is available and, if not, when it will be; the monthly rental; building-specific amenities; and other information.

The Floor Plan Visualizer also shows users where an apartment building is on a neighborhood map and identifies facilities and amenities requested by users, such as restaurants, museums, stores, and more. Although the highly configurable map looks like a seamless part of the Floor Plan Visualizer, it’s actually based on Microsoft Virtual Earth™ and Live Search technology.

Archstone integrates the Virtual Earth and Live Search services with its own application in a software-plus-services model that combines up-to-date, Internet-based information with the highly sophisticated features and interactivity of its own software, which requires a locally running application rather than a Web browser.

Benefits

Archstone is using its new .NET Framework–based solution to shorten the sales cycle and increase sales and customer satisfaction. And because the solution employs Microsoft technologies that have Web-based components, Archstone is well positioned to launch a Web-based version of its solution.

Boosts Customer Satisfaction

In another context, customer self-service might lead to customer dissatisfaction, especially when the customers are affluent individuals accustomed to a high level of customer service. But the opposite is true here, says Taylor.
 
“Because our solution is so visually appealing and so highly interactive, we think it’s actually fun to use,” he says. “And because we are appealing to customers who are accustomed to using sophisticated technology in the workplace and in their daily lives, they are not resistant to using the best of that technology here. This is a really cool application. Anecdotal evidence from the customers who have used it is very positive, and we envision deploying a version of this solution to our mature properties, as well.”

Slashes Development Time 50 Percent

When the company’s sales organization approached Taylor and his colleagues with the request for a new technology solution, the company’s next major real-estate property—Wisconsin Place—was scheduled to open in less than six months. That gave the development team a hard deadline—and an aggressive one at that—against which they had to deliver the solution on time to be useful to Archstone.

They succeeded.

“We developed the solution very quickly, in large part because of the decision to use Microsoft technologies,” says Taylor. He notes that his development team didn’t have to learn less familiar technologies such as Flash, nor did it have to find ways to integrate a Java-based technology with its Microsoft-based data center and infrastructure.

Taylor also attributes the highly productive development schedule to the capabilities of the Microsoft technologies, not just the developers’ familiarity with them. “We needed a great-looking application, we needed it quickly, and Microsoft technologies made that possible,” he says. For example, Windows Presentation Foundation provided the graphic transitions, fades, and animations that give the solution its sophisticated and appealing look—and that Archstone’s developers would otherwise have had to create on their own.

Taking our existing .NET Framework–based solution for our sales offices and extending it to the Web will be relatively straightforward. Michael Bass Lead Solutions Architect, Archstone

Taylor estimates that the development schedule would have been twice as long if his team was required to create the graphics code from scratch. Because it was provided by Windows Presentation Foundation, he was able to meet the company’s business deadline for the solution.

Facilitates Extension to the Web

Archstone is now planning to deploy the Floor Plan Visualizer on the Web to give prospective residents anywhere in the world the same presentation and information available to leasing agents and prospective residents in leasing offices. Web users will see nearly the same highly visual and interactive interface of the original application. The highly cost-effective move to the Web will increase Archstone’s return on investment in Visualizer development.

“Taking our existing .NET Framework–based solution for our sales offices and extending it to the Web will be relatively straightforward,” says Bass. “Microsoft technologies deliver code that’s meant to be reused, so it will be less work to build the Web-based version of the Visualizer than it would be if we’d started with a different development platform.”

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced with Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression® Suite design software. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern, service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to:
www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Archstone call (303) 708-5959 or visit the Web site at:
www.archstoneapartments.com

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