June 1, 2009

CASE STUDY FOR: Mobile Home Park Investments, Inc.  www.mhpiinc.com

Background

London Computer Systems Inc. (LCS), based in Cincinnati, OH, was founded in 1987 by current President and Owner, Dave Hegemann, creator of Rent Manager. LCS has recently created a new feature for their business that integrates rental operations with web site marketing for current and future clients.

MHPI Inc. is a privately-held real estate investment company, based in Chicago, IL, focusing on Manufactured Home Communities. Along with Community Management Service Inc. (CMS), MHPI, Inc. owns and operates 45 Manufactured Home communities across the Midwestern United States and Florida and sells new and pre-owned manufactured homes in all their communities.

Challenge

MHPI's web site that needed a complete overhaul. The look, feel and function all needed help. Plus, they wanted it to be optimized to bring more traffic to their site.

In February of 2008, brothers and business partners, Jason and Eric Hagen, started speaking to Chicago-based firms about handling the design and hosting of their site. The question came up about how to put their available inventory from Rent Manager onto their web site. Jason contacted LCS for help from LCS' web design team.

"We were pleased that Rent Manager did web design and hosting," states Jason Hagen. "But it makes sense they would be able to pull the whole thing together for us because they already know how we need to coordinate the data from Rent Manager to our site and they've done it for other customers."

Solution

MHPI didn't want to redesign their web site if someone was going to enter all the inventory manually which eats up a lot of administrative time. So LCS designed the site to work in real time with Rent Manager. The web site only pulls properties from Rent Manager that are vacant and automatically posts them on the site.

Additionally, potential MHPI residents now have two ways to find a new home: by state or city. For some states, there are multiple communities, so they can narrowed the search to find a specific community where they want to live. The communities don't change but the inventory in each community does. Therefore, future residents can search communities and the property information is always fresh because of the site's constant integration with Rent Manager's inventory. LCS customized this feature for MHPI based on a similar function they already had built for a previous client.

As for internal operations, MHPI also wanted their Property Managers at the properties to always be current on information. Now they can go to the web site and see what homes are for sale in their specific communities and know right away which ones to try and sell.

Result

The new MHPI site went live on April 1, 2009 - within 8 weeks after LCS began work. It's still undergoing some final work with property photos being added slowly, but MHPI has reported that they are very happy with the results and receiving more internet traffic.

"It couldn't have been better," continues J. Hagen. "Rent Manager's design team was great to work with. They took our design hints and mastered it; every word, color and even where we wanted the buttons."

"We were able to do this website for much less than we anticipated. Even with all the technology and integration it's very affordable, simple and powerful with real time integration and that's what we wanted."