Table of Contents and Introduction–Get It Rented

Posted on January 2, 2017 by bobcain

Get It Rented

In this technique- and idea-filled book, Robert Cain brings his 30 years of property management training and publishing experience to show how to use effective and usually inexpensive on-going rental marketing techniques.  These techniques entice the most qualified applicants to respond to that marketing and that the best tenants not only want to continue renting from a landlord but also tell their friends about the great place they live. You will find templates of marketing forms and examples you can use right away and easy systems for keeping track of how your marketing is doing.

Introduction.
Chapter One: What Marketing Is, Why You Might Care, and How It Affects Renting Property.
Chapter Two: Packaging Yourself:  Setting Yourself Apart
Chapter Three: Packaging Your Property.
Chapter Four: Do the Opposite.
Chapter Five: Know Your Market
Chapter Six: Advertising.

  • How to write a good ad.
  • Classified ad in community newspapers.
  • Advertising on rental websites.

Chapter Seven: Other Even More Effective and  Cheaper Types of Marketing.

  • Part One:  How to Use Flyers to Get a Property Rented.
  • Part Two: Buy mailing list and mail about your property.
  • Part Three: Get local merchants to put your flyer in their bags.
  • Part Four: Detailed flyers to hand to prospects.
  • Part Five: The Benefits Sheet
  • Part Six: Set Up a Facebook Page.

Chapter Eight: The Telephone and the Public.

  • Part One: Answering the Telephone.
  • Part Two: Meeting the Public and Prospective Tenants.
  • Part Three:  Complete Instructions for Holding a Super-Duper, Whiz-Bang Rental Open House
  • Part Four:  One More Trick for Presenting the Property.

Chapter Nine: The Most Cost-Effective Kind of Marketing:   Keeping Good Tenants.
Chapter Ten: Salesmanship.
Chapter Eleven: Fair Housing and Marketing.
Chapter Twelve: Fair Housing Basics.

Introduction

The Census Bureau published “The Property Owners and Managers Survey” several years ago in which it analyzed rental owners and rental properties. The study found that “Overall, 58 percent of multifamily properties made a profit or broke even. About 27 percent had a loss, and for 16 percent the owners did not know whether they made or lost money. About 58 percent of small and medium size properties had a profit or broke even, compared to 51 percent of large properties.”  Think of that; just over half of multifamily properties did not lose money.

Notice the figures are for making a profit or breaking even.  We can deduce from that that fewer than half of the rental owners made an actual profit.  But a telling figure is that 16 percent of owners, one in six, had no clue if they made any money or not (and they’re in business?).

I heard one thing consistently in the 25 years I traveled around the country giving speeches and seminars and conducting trainings for rental property owners and managers,  “I can’t get enough good tenants.”  That puzzled me because some 95 percent or more of tenants fall into the “good” category, and they are going to live somewhere.  What were these rental owners doing or not doing that kept them from getting top-notch applicants?

Why they didn’t draw enough, or any,  “good tenants” who wanted to rent their properties? As I eventually sorted out, it was because of poor marketing.  They simply had no clue about how to do a proper job of it. In fact, the one thing they did do is the least effective method, and they didn’t even do that well.

I have been a student of marketing for over 25 years and wrote about marketing tips and tricks regularly in the Rental Property Reporter, which I published until 2014. I have put marketing articles, teleseminars, and material from seminars together into one place, and added and edited so they flowed logically and well to create Get It Rented.

It answers all the marketing questions I can think of, though in spite of my obsession with trying to think of everything, I might have missed one or two. I organized them logically in an easy-to-read, technique-filled book.  It includes templates and forms that I will make available on one of my websites for those who are wise, or desperate, enough to buy the book.

So what are those rental owners doing wrong?  Why aren’t all of them ahead of the game?  Why aren’t good tenants flocking to them, making the phone ring off the hook, clamoring to see these owners’ properties? One of the reasons is sloppy, indifferent or even NO marketing.

Here’s how to adjust your thinking. If the other rental owners aren’t paying attention, all the better for you.  You will get the edge that could mean that your properties make a profit every year, your bank account bulges, and you will be able to retire in comfort.  It begins with marketing.

Marketing is everywhere and we can learn things that work for our rental properties by watching not just how the pros do it but also what other techniques can be even more effective.  Everyone buys (or rents) for his or her own reasons, not ours.  So in order to be effective, we need to appeal to as many of those reasons as we can to hit the bull’s-eye of why a particular person buys. We need to use as many marketing techniques as we can to attract the attention of those excellent prospective tenants who are looking for a new home.  We don’t know which avenue will attract which prospect, so the more we use, the more likely it will be that we reach them.

Whatever factor prompted you to buy something, we will discuss it in this book. It has to do with marketing.  And it’s more than just the advertising, believe me.  Many people believe that marketing and advertising are the same thing, but advertising is just one piece of the marketing picture. In fact, advertising may have had nothing whatsoever to do with why someone ends up buying.  We will look at how each factor affects getting a unit rented.

Do all these work every time?  Of course not, nothing works every time.  Will you need to use every one of these techniques to generate the kind of traffic that you deserve as result of your expertise and experience in rental property management?  Of course not, you pick the techniques you are most comfortable with and use them.  Some techniques work better in conjunction with others, but you’ll be able to figure that out easily.  Try the things that work for you and see what kind of results you get.  Few of them cost much money and some none at all, so you have no risk.

Enjoy this book and “Get It Rented”!

This book is scheduled for release Jan. 31, 2017 both as an ebook and a hard copy. To reserve your own copy, email me.

Copyright 2016, Cain Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.  For more information, address Property News Service, PO Box 68761, Oro Valley, Arizona 85737.

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The False Options

Posted on December 20, 2016 by bobcain

By Robert L, Cain, Copyright 2015, Cain Publications, Inc.
Originally written for Zip Reports, October 2015

Barbara’s son had been transferred from Hawaii to Chicago for a new position in his company. To get his home sold, he was interviewing Realtors to do the job for him.  He had interviewed two.  Pat asked my help in deciding which one was the better choice.

I had done consulting for Barbara before and she was confident that I could help work out this dilemma.  I told her that I wasn’t a Realtor so didn’t know if I could help, but she sent me the materials both Realtors had given to her son. When I looked at the materials, I knew what the problem was. Neither was acceptable.  It turns out this “choice” was a False Dilemma.

The False Dilemma fallacy, also known as the Either/Or Fallacy or Black and White Thinking, is where people believe that they have to choose between two options, and two options only.  In his book 76 Fallacies, Michael Labossiere described it

This line of “reasoning” is fallacious because if both claims could be false, then it cannot be inferred that one is true because the other is false.  That this is the case is made clear by the following example:

  1. Either 1+1=4 or 1+1=12.
  2. It is not the case that 1+1=4.
  3. Therefore 1+1=12. (76 Fallacies)

Of course, sometimes that reasoning must be true such as the case where “Joe is either alive or dead,” but it behooves us to think it through and if there is another or are other alternatives, we can avoid the False Dilemma.

Both employers and landlords can fall into the False Dilemma trap.  Two prospects apply for a job or an apartment and neither is acceptable according to company standards.  But since that’s all who have applied, the owner feels obligated to choose one or the other.

It can be difficult to decide that neither will work and reject both applications because that’s all there are and no more may ever show up—or even worse ones may.  But rejecting both breaks out of the false dilemma trap.

In good business times, it can sometimes be difficult to get acceptable applicants and businesses end up hiring and landlords end up renting to people they are less than sure about.

But the False Dilemma might be the result of our own doing. We all have standards we want to uphold in hiring and renting, but if we continually see applicants who don’t meet those standards, possibly the standards are not reasonable either for that job or that apartment.  In that case, a  reexamination of our standards may be warranted.

One way to examine the standards is to look at good or acceptable existing employees or tenants to see if all of them, using current standards, are people we would hire or rent to if they showed up today.  If they are people we would send on their way, possibly our current standards are not appropriate.  What to look at are where current employees or renters fail to meet those standards and examine if those standards may be requiring more than is reasonable for the position or the apartment.  For example, if asking for a credit score of at least 680 when the vast majority of employees and tenants are somewhere around 650, means that standard just might be cutting off your nose to spite your face. .

Of course, there are absolute requirements that every applicant must meet no matter what.  The first one is that you can verify everything on the application.  The second is that the application is completely filled out.  The third is that the applicant was completely truthful on the application.  That means that all previous addresses and employers, say in the last five years, are included in the appropriate spaces.  The fourth is that the applicant have appropriate picture ID.

After that, most other requirements are up for discussion. Every business is different and every rental property is different, so each has its own permutations and combinations for workable standards.

But back to the False Dilemma.  If after examining the current standards, you find them reasonable and workable, if your current employees or tenants would meet them, you are still usually not stuck with choosing one or the other applicant.  Keep looking.  And back to Barbara,  I emailed her that I wouldn’t hire either of those Realtors and that there must be someone else who could do the job.  It turns out there was, and her son hired someone with considerable experience in selling property on the island and was extremely pleased with the results.

Does your company need content for its website?  How about editing for marketing and intra-company materials?  We offer both those and more at Cain Publications.  We make your written communication shine. If you believe we may of use to your company, email me at bob@cainpublications.com or call 520-975-2435 9am to 5 pm Monday through Friday Mountain Standard Time.

By the way, this article is copyrighted and no part of it may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Cain Publications, Inc.

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Encryption and Why It Is Important

Posted on December 20, 2016 by bobcain

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2015 Cain Publications, Inc.
originally written for Zip Reports Sept. 2015

Cryptography (encryption) is as old as human written communication.  Early Greeks used it to keep enemies from reading their battle plans as did the Romans.  People have used various devices, which became more and more sophisticated as those who might intercept messages became more and more clever about breaking the cryptography.  During the American Revolution, George Washington developed a code to communicate with the American colonists fighting the British, so an intercepted message was indecipherable, something that was in part responsible for American independence.

The movie “The Imitation Game” was all about the cracking of the encryption of the enigma machine, used by the Germans during World War II.

Those were all codes that required physical handling of the coded material, the messages.  Today, however, coding (cryptography) has become infinitely more sophisticated.  It is used for transactions that involve online purchases, communications, and banking, so must be able to keep prying eyes from reading the information and using it for their own nefarious purposes.  And those prying eyes become more and more clever every day about cracking the codes and stealing information.

What is encryption?  How does it work?  Should we trust it with our information?

Bryan Clark in an article “How Does Encryption Work, and Is It Really Safe?”  wrote, “While there is still a (relatively) small demographic that doesn’t trust online banking or making purchases at Amazon or other online retailers, the rest of us are quite a bit safer shopping online (from trusted sources) than we would be from taking that same shopping trip at our local mall.”

As Clark wrote, “Encryption is a modern form of cryptography that allows a user to hide information from others. Encryption uses a complex algorithm called a cipher in order to turn normalized data (plaintext) into a series of seemingly random characters (ciphertext) that is unreadable by those without a special key in which to decrypt it.”  It has become more and more sophisticated because of the ability of computers to decode relatively simple ciphertext.  So ciphertext has become incredibly complex.

Here’s how encryption works, explained in a simple way.  Suppose Jack and Jill want to physically, as in person, send a message to each other without anyone else being able to access it.  They use a metal box.  The box contains a padlock; let’s call that the public key, with a key required to open it, the private key.  In the more advanced form of encryption, asymmetric, there are two different keys.  He opens the box, plops in his message, and locks the padlock, securing the box.

Jack can’t reopen the box since it requires Jill’s private key to unlock it.  Once Jill gets the box, she uses her private key to open the padlock.  Now Jill wants to send a message back to Jack, something like a get-well message for “breaking your crown” after going up the hill to fetch a pail of water.  She plops her message into the box and locks Jack’s padlock onto it.  That padlock requires Jack’s private key to open it.  She sends it off to Jack with her open padlock in the box so Jack can send her back a secret message.

Online encryption, what they use to make the information we transmit on the internet, works mostly the same way only with numbers so large, prime numbers of 100+ characters translated into gibberish as keys, that it would require the most sophisticated computer in the world in the neighborhood of one million years to crack using what’s known as the “brute force” method, that is, trying things until they come up with the right key.  That’s counter-productive for crooks.  But there’s another way we will look at in a minute.  We can spot when a website is encrypted because we see an https in front of the web address and a small lock in the web address slot.

I won’t go into the math that is used to encrypt.  For a complete and somewhat head-scratching explanation, go to Bryan Clark’s excellent article at www.makeuseof.com/tag/encryption-care.

They still use two keys.  They just aren’t physical keys, but as long as both sets of keys remain secret or unbreakable, everything is fine. The private and public keys are still used. You may have seen an example of a “key” at some time, but here’s what one looks like:

Good luck trying to crack the code!

—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—–
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)

pre+FOhLuyw3pzpglr5G5braQeGo9HOPWXLr0ukl3fgW0uwBVgdK5lfmCrEKnMQM pOrtlMiheQ09EYMqtCQBt+bI27Swd0WgFkkDkuTdcFVp72C2/g5zPiLVc2j3qhgV go5RntvCoTOQ+oQbt9ioUePm9JH4DNoTzd41tybIL/6ekgWoObBETEQKCixfaP3w hQEOAxgx8INo4cXhEAQAhU44e428lReSMKECqsZ/6/SXg+bud7eP6L+KN2/W9JIJ G6VHVfDaf7svXvRs8V0yteVSvH5Bym9WecaJaD200y18CuV5iK10dLL4nw1B99I8 6zwnWSZsRDomJ69N9h6oR92/Npsb5Af0dML9MaKTBM0OrcjCvIchvZbGVAymoHoE AJFH8GoYQH3r22k7iJC2JkfF5j5+K7EQLQrSDq5nIZG/iI6Tn+mhJulcMnxpBjE6 uciq47eWiodBmHxBu4H008/fVmcV3BixNaiVmD9DYJ1p/z6AlyyifeCpr6hG9kng jeWVNQ5ReZZR+FAr61zIvwaMH4hRA0oblN8SH9qNVD+700AEjb8AFS7egMvBnXQL qb2ARo+zKN/yV9FNnyTuWXCBt3TqCYm3Z/X9Y3HKdyYeImwG6DiP5vzHB+uMNCpX avr3kLY8TsKwmUEUL1rYs3FIuXO2u4siSSbLr2UzPmtgpRIS2BdwBnNIc9yLuHVn
—–END PGP MESSAGE—– (explainthatstuff.com)

Other encryption will look and be just as unreadable. No one can read the encrypted information we send to Amazon to buy something.  No one can read the encryption we exchange with banks to bank online.  No one can read the encryption from the Starbucks terminal that we use to buy a $6.00 cup of coffee. That’s where the hackers come in.  In a Wall Street Journal article April 20, 2015, Elizabeth Dwoskin explained, “If a hacker obtains the encryption keys, or the formula that unlocks the code, all that encryption was for naught.”  After all, Target had good encryption, as did Home Depot, as did the US Government’s employee database, as did Ashley Madison, as did Sony, as did many others, but hackers got in by finding a back door, a place with a password that was easily cracked, to sneak into the database of these and more companies.

They did that by using insecure passwords that allowed them access to the entire database of a company.  Many times these were from contractors, third-parties, who had or needed access to the affected company’s main database.  It was all downhill for customers and consumers from there.

Many times one password they got was used in several other places so could be used to access company and personal information, such as bank and credit accounts, confidential records, and legal documents.

The warnings are clear.  We don’t need to be concerned about our data being compromised as long as all the keys stay in the possession of the people they are intended for.  It’s when they fall into the hands of those who are less than honorable that we should start worrying.

Does your company need content for its website?  How about editing for marketing and intra-company materials?  We offer both those and more at Cain Publications.  We make your written communication shine.   If you believe we may be able to help, please email me at bob@cainpublications.com or call 520-975-2435, 9 am to 5 pm Mountain Standard Time.

By the way, this article is copyrighted and no part of it may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Cain Publications, Inc.

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CIO Magazine Tech Poll Reveals Momentum in Mobile App Investments

Posted on December 20, 2013 by bobcain

CIO Magazine Tech Poll Reveals Momentum in Mobile App Investments

IT Leaders Embrace Next Waves of IT Innovation

FRAMINGHAM, MA–(Marketwired – Dec 19, 2013) – IDG’s CIO — the executive-level IT media brand providing insight into business technology leadership — releases the CIO Magazine Tech Poll results for November 2013. According to the poll, a majority of IT leaders plan to increase IT spending in the next year across multiple edge technologies.

Results from more than 200 top IT executives reveals that organizations, on average are seeing an overall increase of 5.2% to their budgets in the coming year, with an investment focus on enabling business process innovation. Aligning with this business objective, IT leaders continue to allocate more of their budget on edge technologies, particularly, mobile apps (58%), tablets (55%), business intelligence and analytics (54%), and cloud computing (51%). Currently, 52% of enterprises are researching or piloting mobile apps, with an additional 23% already producing a mobile app for their business unit or division.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/CIO-Magazine-Tech-Poll-Reveals-Momentum-in-Mobile-App-Investments-1864323.htm

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The False Dilemma Fallacy

Posted on June 11, 2013 by bobcain

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2013 Cain Publications, Inc.

Remember when we were kids?  Well, us males, anyway.  A common 12-year-old male’s question to his fellow 12-year-olds was something to the effect “Would you rather _________ or ______?”  It was a choice between two gross and disgusting options. (Males, you can fill in the blanks because I am sure you remember the various options.) That was our introduction to the false dilemma fallacy.  We had to choose between two objectionable things, without the choice of “neither.” In fact, if we objected that neither was something we wanted, the 12-year-old asking the question would tell us we didn’t have that option: we had to choose.

Today, all grown up now, we see this come up in poll questions.  The June 6-9, 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center illustrates that.  They asked, for all intents and purposes, “Would you rather have terrorists running around loose or give up your freedom?” as if there were no other option.  Pollsters are good at disguising questions that if worded differently would elicit a response of “neither” or “I’m not going to answer such a ridiculous question.” This one was worded “NSA is getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.”  Is that acceptable or not acceptable?

We can be safe from terrorism any number of ways that do not include intruding on people’s privacy and violating the Fourth Amendment right against illegal searches.

The question is a false dilemma because built in to that question is the requirement that it must be investigating terrorism or not investigating terrorism.  The option is keeping our Fourth Amendment rights or not. No other option. A more objective way to word it would have been “Which of the following methods do you feel the government should use to investigate terrorism while still abiding by our constitutional guarantees against illegal or intrusive searches?”  Then it could list several methods, one of which would be tracking people’s phone use.  We have to wonder how that would come out.

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Considering Noses

Posted on May 31, 2013 by bobcain

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2005 Cain Publications, Inc.

Let us consider noses. Your nose belongs to you and my rights stop right where your nose starts. Noses are also used to stick in other people’s business. Noses that get stuck in other people’s business sometimes end up complaining about their rights.

“The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Let us consider what is best for people. I don’t know what is best for people. Rather I have to rely on them to decide. I know some things that are probably bad for them; some things are bad for me, too. Too many cookies are bad for me. The cigar I smoke once a month is probably bad for me. Having three drinks in an evening is probably bad for me.

Even so, I have to ask myself, am I sure what I think is bad is truly bad for them? It is not just a question of whether I am sure, either. It is also a question of whether I know a workable solution for what is bad for them. And if it truly is bad for them, and I know the solution to what is bad for them, does my nose belong in trying to sort out a solution for them?

Let us consider unintended consequences. You can’t do just one thing. You can never drop a pebble in the water and have it go straight to the bottom affecting nothing on the way down.

Watch the pebble. When the pebble drops in the water the first consequence is the ripples it creates that will go on and on until something gets in their way and stops them. What happens when the ripples hit something? Maybe nothing that we can perceive happens. Nonetheless, something happens at least on the atomic level that affects another atom, which affects another atom, which affects another, ad infinitum. We can in no way predict from there what the effect will be, can we? Chaos theorists have tried to predict, but it is still only speculation.

Watch the pebble. As it drops toward the bottom of the pond, it scares a fish who will dart out of the way. What will the fish run into? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. But for the pebble, the fish probably would not have gone where it did at that moment.

Watch the pebble. When it hits the bottom of the pond it creates a crater of mud that sprays up in all directions. It is not a big crater, just a little one, almost unnoticeable. What will be the result of disturbing the mud? We certainly can’t predict that with any certainty whatsoever. Maybe a stash of frog eggs will be uncovered, providing food for the fish that just got scared by the pebble. That is bad news for tadpoles that will never become frogs, but good news for the fish.

Watch yourself. I’ll watch myself, too. Everything everyone does has consequences that cannot be predicted. Most assuredly you can predict an immediate consequence. If you pound a six-penny nail into a two-by-four, the board will have a new hole in it filled by a nail. What happens after that? If the nail goes all the way through into the surface beneath, it makes another hole. Maybe you shouldn’t have been using that table to pound on. Now the table has a hole and your wife sees it.

She gets angry with you and storms out of the house. While she is out, she passes a store that sells lottery tickets and decides to buy one. It turns out to be the winning ticket for the $100 million PowerBall jackpot. Now you can retire in luxury and buy all the tables you want. All that was the consequence of pounding a nail. Of course it could have turned out far differently. But we can never predict.

Let us consider technology. Modern technology has made it oh so much easier to drop pebbles into ponds and create waves that can go around and around the world. The invention of the word processor, for example, had the consequence of making it easier to write and fill up many more pages than necessary to say what we might have said 30 years ago in fewer pages.

The word processor has helped undermine good grammar and punctuation. That is certainly a big ripple. All kinds of opuses are self-published every day because they can be. They are published replete with grammatical and punctuation errors that make me cringe when I read them—at least as far as I read. People for some reason tend to believe things they see in print or on their computer screens. When they see improper use of the English language, they might think that either what they see is correct or “if proper English usage isn’t important to anybody else, why should it be to me?”

Modern technology in the form of the world-wide web has made it infinitely easier to communicate all kinds of information, true or not, interesting or not, well-researched or not, all around the world in an instant for everyone to read. In fact it seems as if a need has sprouted that compels people to try to be first with the news, regardless of how it comes out. Not entirely correct? Oh, well, we got there first. We can sort out what passes for truth later. Lying to so many people has never been so easy.

Since people believe what they see on the internet is correct; or they think what they see there is something to be emulated; or they think that when they see unethical and immoral people misbehaving it is acceptable, a consequence is an increasingly downward-spiral of ethics and morality. Is that the only cause of moral and ethical misbehavior? Certainly not, we have always had ethical misbehavior. Modern technology can’t take credit for lack of ethics. It is just so much more easily communicated today.

Let us consider noses again. The fist of the misuse of technology is either rapidly approaching our noses or has already hit them. The question is do we swing back? If so, what do we hit back with? Watch the pebble. When you drop the pebble into the modern technology morass, you can’t tell what the ultimate result will be.

Let us consider those unintended consequences before we swing back. What can we do to correct those easily perceived abuses, while saving the life of the technology goose that is laying the golden egg? Let us consider unintended consequences and noses.

I say with Thomas Jefferson, “The government that governs best governs least.” The society that interferes as little as possible in the lives of its citizens survives intact and prospers best.

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Questions Trainers Ask

Posted on February 18, 2013 by bobcain

Questions Trainers Ask

Questions of Clarification
• What do you mean when you say ____?
• What is your main point?
• How does ____ relate to ____?
• Could you put that another way?
• Let me see if I understand you; do you mean ______ or ______?
• How does this relate to our problem/discussion/issue?
• Jane, can you summarize in your own words what Richard said? Richard, is that what you meant?
• Could you give me an example?
• Would ______ be a good example of that?

Questions that probe assumptions
• What are you assuming here?
• What is Jenny assuming?
• What could we assume instead?
• You seem to be assuming ______. Do I understand you correctly?
• All of your reasoning depends on the idea that ______. Why have you based your reasoning on ______ instead of ______?
• You seem to be assuming ______. How do you justify taking that for granted?
• Is that always the case? Why do you think the assumption holds here?
• Why would someone make that assumption?

Questions that probe reasons and evidence
• Could you explain your reasons to us?
• How does that apply to this case?
• Is there a reason to doubt that evidence?
• Who is in a position to know that is true?
• What would you say to someone who said that ______?
• Can someone else give evidence to support that conclusion?
• How could we find out if that is true?

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10 Office Technologies on Their Way Out

Posted on January 11, 2013 by bobcain

Seth FiegermanSep 25, 2012

Here’s a question you may not hear at all in 2017: “Did you get my fax?”

LinkedIn surveyed more than 7,000 global professionals about which tools and trends will disappear from offices in the next five years and which will become even more common. Nearly three quarters of those surveyed said they expected fax machines to disappear, making it the second most likely office technology to go extinct behind tape recorders.

Other once common office tools like the Rolodex, desk phones and even desktop computers ranked high on the list of items likely to become obsolete in the workplace. Meanwhile, more than half of professionals surveyed (55%) believe that tablets will become increasingly common in the office, the most of any technology on the list. Laptops also ranked high, with 34% of those surveyed predicting it would become more common.

The survey is just the latest example that workplaces are gradually abandoning analog technologies for digital. Those in the workforce will need to adapt to these changes or else risk having technological skills that are obsolete as well.

While it’s unlikely many workers will mourn the loss of the fax machine, some may be more nostalgic for other vanishing fixtures of office life like the Rolodex or business cards (which ranked 12th on the list.)

Here are the top 10 office tools and trends that professionals think will vanish in the next five years:

1. Tape recorders (79 percent)
2. Fax machines (71 percent)
3. The Rolodex (58 percent)
4. Standard working hours (57 percent)
5. Desk phones (35 percent)
6. Desktop computers (34 percent)
7. Formal business attire like suits, ties, pantyhose, etc. (27 percent)
8. The corner office for managers/executives (21 percent)
9. Cubicles (19 percent)
10. USB thumb drives (17 percent)

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Help make this forum valuable

Posted on May 25, 2011 by bobcain

I am looking for ideas for posts to this forum.

If you have a topic to suggest or information to share, please post your thoughts.  I will do my best to add to the discussion with information and ideas.

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