Apartment Marketers Making Most of Metaverse, NFTs, Crypto

With the 18-to-34 age group most interested in the Metaverse, cryptocurrency and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), leveraging those concepts is something apartment marketers – especially in student housing – are exploring.

Christy McFerren, President at Catalyst; and Laurel Zacher, Vice President, Marketing and Talent Development at Security Properties; explored the Metaverse — what it is, how marketers can step into it, and how it might even drive leases while having fun in the session “Metaverse Marketing Mania — Driving Leasing with Crypto, NFTs, Streaming, and More” at the Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference this week in Huntington Beach, Calif.

She said her student housing communities have had campaigns where residents were offered the chance to win $1,000 in bitcoin or have their design team work with residents to create their own NFTs if they renewed their leases.

In other cases, discounts or concessions were offered in some way. She said it drove more than 1,000 renewals. McFerren said that today the research shows interest in these topics is split 50-50 between females and males.

“What it comes down to right now is all of these words that we don’t all understand like virtual reality, augmented reality, gaming and what they do for social media,” McFerren said. “It’s almost like the Internet was when that was first starting more than 20 years ago.”

Said Zacher, “You see all of these companies that are using it or talking about it in some way – such as Nike, Disney, Coke, Verizon, Hyundai and now even Wendy’s has a restaurant in the metaverse – so as an apartment company, you have to think, ‘I need to find out how to use it in my business.’ ”

Identifying ‘Gen-NFT’

In marketing terms, McFerren said that one campaign was “geNFTs” to play off “Generation NFT.” 

She said one challenge was to establish a bitcoin exchange account through the platform Coinbase.

“It can be done, but there are many steps involved,” she said. McFerren said that overly data-reliant marketers right now will struggle to measure their metaverse marketing because, “the data is quite scattered right now; there’s nothing like a “Google Analytics” for it.

She said the mindset for those wanting to explore the metaverse consists of several stages, but that companies should persist. The stages: “Wow, this is cool.”; “I don’t really understand it, but our company could benefit from it.”; “Hey, no one’s interested in what we’re doing in the metaverse.”; and finally, “Well, I’ve invested so much into this effort already, I might as well stick to it.”