Can a few good marketers help save apartment developers from themselves as a tidal wave of rental-housing overbuilding looms?

Yes, contend condo developers and marketers Merrill H. Diamond and Thomas Skahen, who are on a new mission to bring snappy, condo-style marketing to the ho-hum world of apartment leasing.

With every builder and his brother looking to put up new apartment high-rises from downtown Boston to Interstate 495, we are on track to wind up with lots of empty units in cookie-cutter projects.

But where I see potential disaster, Diamond and Skahen – who helped turn the old Norfolk County jail in Dedham into luxury condos and save Natick’s once-struggling Nouvelle mall condo tower, respectively – see big opportunities.

“You can’t just put up a marketing sign,” noted Skahen, partner and co-founder of Littleton-based PrimeTime Communities, which just won a deal to market a new, luxury Portsmouth, N.H., rental community. “It’s no different than what we do with condos – you have to sell the lifestyle.”

‘Maddeningly Similar’

I’ve written in this space before regarding my skepticism toward the apartment boom.

Rentals are great and we need more of them, but Greater Boston developers are too often like lemmings, blindly following the market leaders over the latest cliff.

A few years ago it was luxury condos for empty nesters, and before that, telecom hotels.

Now it’s the turn of apartments, with literally thousands of units in the pipeline or ready to break ground in Boston and the suburbs.

But it’s not just volume that’s the problem here. The bigger issue is that it’s going to be hard to tell one luxury rental complex from another.

The ones in the city will have a high-rise look, while their suburban counterparts will sprawl outwards, rather than upwards. But that’s about it.

We are talking one or two bedrooms at the max, with unimaginative, maddeningly similar layouts, appliances, carpeting and woodwork.

Some of this is the nature of the beast – rentals in our still ownership-driven society are designed to be transitory.

The rest of the blame, though, goes to petty minded suburban officials, worried that three-bedroom rentals will attract the families with children, and, God forbid, drive up school costs.

“They all start to look the same and all look vanilla,” Skahen said of a rental market increasingly dominated by big chains.

So that’s where veteran condo developers and marketers like Skahen and Diamond come in.

The fact is, if your new high-rise is not much different than the box down the street, you are going to need a little zip in your marketing to fill all those empty units.

Marketing Magic

Diamond, who’s launched a new firm in Boston called IGNITION Residential with a couple of younger, social media marketing upstarts, knows a few things about turning lemons into lemonade.

After all, there were more than a few skeptics of the idea that an old county jail in Dedham might find new life as a residential hotspot.

But instead of trying to run from the building’s controversial origins, Diamond instead embraced the jail theme in his marketing.

Meanwhile, Skahen and gang managed to turn around the white elephant of condo project busts, the Nouvelle tower overlooking the revamped Natick mall, unloading a whole bunch of units at auction and then steadily selling off the rest.

It was once one of the biggest jokes around, but no one is laughing anymore.

Skahen noted he’s just signed up to help market a new Portsmouth rental development. Called the Portwalk, units that had been slated for sale as condos will now be rented for $1,800 to $2,800 a month.

Let’s face it, the apartment sector could use some sales savvy.

It’s a field where too often marketing is simply taking an ad out in the paper or hiring a local broker to lease apartments. OK, the bigger companies, like Avalon Bay, have their own system, but it doesn’t take much to stand out in this arena, where “boring” has long been the watchword.

In this environment, Diamond sees location as shaping up to be the key factor in marketing some of these new rental high-rises.

Renters will overlook a mundane apartment if the location is an exciting one, he contends.

“There well may be a glut of apartments,” Diamond noted. “There are going to be a lot of apartment communities over the next year or two. General branding and product differentiation might be more important than previously thought.”