Forget swimming pools or weight rooms. What renters of the next century are going to want are ultra-high-speed Internet connections. And in California’s Silicon Valley, and a few apartment complexes elsewhere in the nation, they are getting it.
A new 709-unit building in Sunnyvale, Calif., is being wired with T1 phone lines, the kind of high-speed connections used by global corporations that run 50 times the speed of a regular telephone modem.
The lines will cost an individual renter an extra $100 a month. That’s on top of rent, which ranges from $1,150 a month for a studio to $2,270 for a three-bedroom unit. Of the 132 apartments built so far, 130 are rented and 25 people have signed up for a T1 line.
“This will become as essential a part of living in the valley as cable TV was 15 years ago,” Richard Mehrer, manager of information systems for the complex, Bay Apartment Communities, a San Jose-based real estate investment trust, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Martine Kempf, a 39-year-old French inventor who builds voice-control devices for wheelchair users, is one renter lured by the easy access to high-speed lines. With her apartment now her office, she uses the Internet to call up specification sheets online in seconds.
“Home-based workers are a huge and very pressing market for us,” Jim Pflaging, president of Pacific Bell Network Integration, which wired the complex, told the Chronicle. “This is the first Internet-ready, telecommute-friendly living environment we’ve seen. We think this will be the start of a big trend.”
Mehrer, who also chairs the technology committee of the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, said he fields at least one call a day from developers interested in copying the idea.
More intrusions
Surfing the online real estate listings now may be quick and easy but as advertisers get wise to the ways of the World Wide Web, consumers can expect to be confronted by more creative and, to some, more intrusive ways of getting their attention.
With the number of potential customers only increasing as Internet users increase, advertisers are testing all kinds of online ad approaches to see what works, some with unexpected results, according to Web Week.
One trend consumers are likely to see: more sophisticated visuals and more of them. A golf company that ran a video banner ad campaign in August–video banners are ads with multimedia elements–found that the number of clicks on their ads was 200 to 300 percent greater than traditional banner ads, for example.
Another seeming success story is so-called pop-up ads, sales pitches that pop up on the screen and require users to click through before they can move on.
America Online, the nation’s leading online subscriber service, has been running increasing numbers of pop-up ads promoting everything from books to the company’s own Visa card. The campaign has had mixed but generally positive results, a company spokesperson told Web Week.
In commissioning a survey of its customers to measure the effectiveness of banner advertising, AOL found a startling 40 percent who remembered the content of banner ads they had seen in both AOL content and chat areas. Perhaps more significantly, the study found that banner ads apparently increased the intent to purchase products between 2 and 10 percent in the test group.
With these kind of results, it’s no wonder that a new report from Hypermedia Communications estimates the money spent by U.S. companies for Internet-specific product promotion will total nearly $300 billion by 1999, an almost 20 percent increase over the $157 billion spent in 1996. The money goes toward creating electronic graphics or multimedia for online advertising, developing product Web sites and staff training, according to the report.
Bazaar search
When you guess at an Internet address, what you get doesn’t always match what you think you asked for. Sometimes the search seems like wandering through a bazaar, looking for a specific item.
If you go looking for the Mortgage Bankers Association, for example, you would come up with some surprises.
You might think that www.mba.org would be the address for the Mortgage Bankers Association, or possibly the masters in business administration program at some prestigious school.
But the page that appears–“Welcome to Mahavaipulya Buddhist Association Home Page”–doesn’t appear to have much to do with mortgages. It’s under construction, so you can’t tell for sure.
The address www.mba.com currently comes up with nothing, which is a surprise, given the number of acronyms that would fit those letters.
The bankers trade group’s full name is the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. So you try www.mbaa.com only to find that it belongs to the Master Brewers Association of the Americas who proclaim to be “Dedicated to the art and science of brewing for over 100 years.”
Great page, but not what you’re looking for.
There’s another option: www.mbaa.org. Eureka! Now bookmark it so you don’t have to wander through the Buddhists and the brewers again to get to the mortgage bankers.
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Chicago Tribune Homes
Additional real estate information, including a monthly index of Inman News Features, is available at Chicago Tribune Homes on the World Wide Web. Go to chicago.tribune.com/go/homes/ and click News & Features.
