Dubbed Market Comps, it’s the latest offering from the real-time availability experts at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based VautWare, and is powered by listings data from more than 25,000 properties who advertise on Rent.com.

With an interface that’s way more simple than the firm’s PadZing offering, which touted itself as the Zillow for multifamily before Zillow starting doing multifamily, Market Comps offers community managers a single-screen view into their competitors’ pricing. It shows them where their own properties stack up on average rent and rent per square foot, even unit-specific pricing for different floor plans.

Market Comps' baseline property comparison screen.

Not only does that hold the promise of taking a big load off leasing agents who spend at least part of their jobs calling the competition for current rents, it’s a first step toward automated pricing for smaller operators. What’s more, it provides an alternative to full-blown software packages costing tens of thousands of dollars. Multifamily RevMan watchers have often pointed to the price points of those solutions as one of the major impediments to wider-scale adoption of the technology by small and mid-size operators.

“At a minimum, its a first cut of a poor man’s revenue management system,” said Mike Mueller, VaultWare’s CEO. “It’s property specific and takes just minutes to set up. We made it super simple for our industry.”

After fielding feedback from users that PadZing was complicated and confusing to use, VaultWare developed Market Comps to do one thing well: show you the actual pricing at your comps, updated once a week, and where you stack up against them, on one screen. Gone are PadZing’s cumbersome mapping tools, or the myriad filters you could apply to the wealth of data there.

No, instead of giving you too much, Market Comps gives you more by giving you less. The tool has two basic views, graphing your property against your immediate comps, and comparing your property to those around it by unit type. You can pull down tabs for average rent, by unit type, for the last 1 to 24 months, and you can export any of it to Excel for a property-by-property comparison of how you’re doing against your peers. Click here for a video tour of the tool.

Market Comps' floor plan comparisons and reports exported to Excel.

Finally, you can set up e-mail alerts to receive notification when your own rents hit a pre-determined trigger against your competition. For example, if you want to know when your 1 bedrooms fall outside of a range within $25 of your nearest comp, Market Comps will send you an email telling you so.

“Most other sources are expensive and already out of date when purchased,” said Mike Cornell, VaultWare’s president. “Market Comps does the work for the properties and ensures they are aware of changes to their market conditions as they happen rather than reacting to a trend that happened weeks or months ago.”

Market Comps' email alert tool

Perhaps most compelling about the offering is price: the basic version is free for VaultWare and Rent.com customers, while the Premium offering – which allows you to see your property-by-property comp report, export floor plans and set alerts – is $300 a year. At this time, the product is only available to customers of the those two firms.

Steve Small, Executive Vice President, AMLI Residential

Does revenue management work?  Steve Small of AMLI says yes.  At the 2008 AIM Conference, AMLI Executive Vice President Steve Small presented a case study of the impact of revenue management on  AMLI’s NOI growth performance relative to its REIT peers.  (Data was taken prior to the company’s purchase by Morgan Stanley.)

• According to a Wachovia Securities study performed annually, in 2000 AMLI ranked ninth among its peers in revenue growth.  After implementing revenue management and other optimization techniques it ranked first in the REIT peer group from 2003 until the company went private in 2006.

• At the same conference, Small presented a 2006-2007 analysis of AMLI’s NOI growth by market relative to the NCREIF index.   AMLI outperformed the NCREIF index in every one of its markets by 30 to 105 basis points of NOI growth during the period of the second quarter of 2006 through the first quarter of 2007.  AMLI’s markets were:  Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Florida, Houston, Kansas, New Jersey, Seattle and Southern California.

The complete slide presentation may be found online on the AIM Conference site.