Residents can submit maintenance requests, pay rent online or send an email to the property managers through Respage Portal. Property managers can post announcements, newsletters, resident offers and resident forms. Respage also has a local business directory and links to help residents sign up for utility service, schools or submit a change of address form. Respage even allows you to earn ancillary revenue by selling advertising to local businesses.

Both Respage Community and Respage Portal link to your Twitter profile, Facebook Page and marketing website. Need to get set up on Facebook or Twitter? We can help. Need help monitoring your social media sites and responding to comments? We can help.

We know you don't have any spare time. That's why we've made Respage a full service product. We maintain your Respage and do your posts for you. Just email us any changes you'd like to make, and we'll take care of the rest. We'll even post to your social media accounts. Just email us what you'd like to say on Facebook and Twitter and we'll update your status for you. No need to log into 4 different sites or figure out how to use them! Because we're doing most of the work, Respage takes only a few minutes a week of your time.

We've learned a lot by helping our customers launch and manage their social media campaigns. Click here to see some of the social media ideas and best practices we've developed.

In the beginning . . . we put the Cart Before the Horse

CartandHorse.com

It all started in the fall of 2005. At that point, the promise of an online, Yellow Pages-like local search tool was all the rage. We felt that if we could provide apartment communities with directories for local businesses and community resources, it would be of great value to residents, property managers, and local business owners. In early 2006, we launched CartandHorse.com, a hand compiled directory of local businesses.

CartandHorse.com proved costly and difficult to scale. After developing directories for several local markets, we set the project aside.

eRetriever

In late 2007, at the Apartment Association of Greater Philadelphia holiday party, one of our clients approached us. He was interested in partnering with our company to develop an online concierge service for his properties that would allow him to offer his residents Class A apartment amenities at Class B prices. We were flattered, but we didn’t really expect it to go anywhere.

We met early in 2008, and much to our surprise, we moved forward. By then, the idea had evolved, and we were able to reposition our earlier project into a virtual concierge service powered by CartandHorse. Within a few months, we rolled out eRetriever.com, a local business directory/eConcierge service. Designed to help relieve the stress of moving into a new apartment community as well as provide information to help residents take advantage of local businesses and community resources, we were optimistic that we had a winning concept.

We quickly learned to appreciate how busy property managers really are! As a result, our goal became to develop eRetriever into a resource that would help both community residents and onsite staff.

2008 was a tough year, and moving this new concept forward was more difficult than we expected, but we were making progress.

Respage

They say luck happens when persistence meets opportunity, and ours soon changed. We noticed that user generated content was becoming increasingly important to how people interacted on the web. This trend led to the rise of applications such as blogs, social networks, and media sharing sites that satisfy users’ desire to socialize on the web.

In the fall of 2009, we repositioned eRetriever to allow busy property managers to tap into the “social web.” The result was Respage (respage.com), a full service social media platform. Respage provides our customers with a robust and responsive social media presence in just a minute or two a week. We're well into 2010, and while we still have a long way to go in making Respage everything it can be, we are now managing social media for enough communities to know that Respage is part of our company’s future.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the many people and organizations that have played a critical role in our development of Respage. Thanks to:

Everyone at Westover Companies for your patience with eRetriever and for helping us remember that failure is not an option.

Our friends at Waffl.com whose knowledge and understanding of social media and Postling.com product has helped us formulate a more effective Respage.

The entire 4 Walls team for its flexibility and understanding during our numerous iterations of this idea and for your strong customer service orientation, which is the cornerstone of the Respage service.

We are sincerely interested in your feedback. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.