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2400 Chestnut has been part of Philadelphia’s Fitler Square neighborhood for more than 50 years, with a location that puts residents within easy reach of some of the city’s biggest employers, universities, and transportation options.
The 368-unit high-rise sits diagonally from 30th Street Station, just across the Schuylkill River from University City. It’s minutes away from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and Philadelphia’s largest medical institutions.
Not surprisingly, the community’s prime location has kept it in high demand for decades. The same management group, 2400 Chestnut Associates, has owned and operated the property for 45 years, and according to Property Manager Jason Bloom, the building has remained consistently full for nearly all of them.
Approximately 480 residents call 2400 Chestnut home, many of them graduate and MBA students between the ages of 25 and 35. For residents balancing school, work, and life in the city, amenities that save time, stretch budgets, and serve a real purpose are especially valuable.
That thinking carried into a major renovation several years ago, when the community added study rooms, a club lounge, and a state-of-the-art fitness center. But keeping up with the amenity Joneses wasn’t the goal. The team wanted to invest where it would count with their residents.
PrintWithMe and SipWithMe fit that philosophy perfectly. And with 227.4K+ pages printed and 39K+ cups of coffee poured, residents have made it clear the team made the right call.
Fewer than 20 people keep 2400 Chestnut running. Bloom describes it as “managing a small town within a city,” and from March through August, running that small town becomes a huge undertaking.
Because so many of the community’s residents are graduate and MBA students, graduation creates a significant annual turnover cycle. Between one-third and half of the building can turn, sending the team into a marathon of tours, new leases, and move-in prep.
And once peak leasing season wraps? There’s still a high-rise to operate, residents to support and a long list of daily responsibilities competing for the team’s attention.
That makes every hour of staff time count.
Before PrintWithMe, resident printing required more staff involvement than the tasks warranted. Residents sent documents to the leasing office, staff printed them on the office copier and the finished pages waited on the counter for pickup. Bloom and his team were always happy to help, but the volume turned a simple courtesy into a significant time commitment.
Midterms and finals turned up the volume even more. Bloom estimates the leasing office would handle as many as 20 resident print jobs in a single day, ranging from a few pages to documents well over 100 pages.
But the biggest issue wasn’t any single 150-page request. It was that printing had become another time-consuming task for a team that was already juggling far too many responsibilities. And because every request ran through the leasing office, residents could only print during business hours.
Bloom wanted to find a way to give residents the ability to print independently and take his team out of the equation entirely.
Before joining multifamily, Bloom spent 25 years in the hotel industry, where self-serve business centers had long been part of the guest experience. He knew residents didn’t need someone standing between them and the printer. They needed a way to handle it themselves, whenever their schedules called for it.
“Taking the printing away from…the leasing office and giving our residents 24-hour access was important,” Bloom said.
But Bloom also knew that simply moving a property-managed printer into the club lounge would only relocate the responsibility. The team had already placed two computers in the space, both of which eventually ended up with viruses, and he had no interest in adding another piece of technology for staff to troubleshoot and maintain.
PrintWithMe gave Bloom exactly what he was looking for. Residents are now able to print 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, while his team no longer has to facilitate every request. Supplies, service, and support are handled by PrintWithMe, and proprietary technology releases documents on demand, rather than leaving pages sitting unattended.
“Being able to come down and not have your personal confidential information sitting on the printer is huge,” Bloom said. “They just have to come down and punch the code in.”
Self-serve printing wasn’t the only lesson Bloom brought with him from hospitality. After more than two decades around hotel coffee, he had encountered just about every version of it, from powdered and premade options to pod-based machines. So when 2400 Chestnut decided to introduce complimentary resident coffee for the first time, Bloom refused to settle for anything less than SipWithMe.
Like PrintWithMe, SipWithMe was designed to empower residents and minimize staff involvement. Residents have the ability to customize dozens of barista-quality specialty beverages, all ready in under :60, while the fully managed service keeps inventory management and support off the team’s plate.
“SipWithMe and PrintWithMe both complemented each other,” Bloom said. “And we only had to deal with one company, which was great. That’s why we went with both.”
At 2400 Chestnut, PrintWithMe and SipWithMe sit across from one another in the club lounge and play a starring role on property tours. Bloom highlights both on every single site appointment, putting two of the community’s most-used amenities front and center from the start.
Since PrintWithMe and SipWithMe were installed at 2400 Chestnut in May 2024, residents have put both to work. PrintWithMe has racked up 1K+ unique users, 14.5K+ orders, and 227.4K+ printed pages, with unit utilization reaching 283%.
“People see it as a huge savings,” Bloom said of PrintWithMe. “They’ll print a 100-page book and they know in the back of their mind they’re not paying for the ink.”
On the coffee side, 1K+ SipWithMe users have enjoyed 39K+ cups.
“I’m sure everybody in this building has a coffee maker in their apartment, yet they still come down because it’s a good cup of coffee and it’s saving them money and a trip,” Bloom said. “A lot of them are on a budget.”
For Bloom, that kind of resident response is exactly what makes an amenity worth offering.
That value fits naturally with how 2400 Chestnut approaches its broader amenity experience. Rather than attaching separate fees to its fitness center, package handling, bike storage, and other offerings, the property builds them into the cost of living there.
“A lot of the buildings around here kind of nickel and dime the residents for every little thing,” Bloom said. “We just build it into the cost, and that, to me, goes a long way.”
PrintWithMe has delivered on the staff side of the equation, too. Those 14.5K+ orders represent thousands of print jobs residents have handled for themselves instead of sending them through the leasing office, giving Bloom and his team valuable time back.
“Having PrintWithMe available 24/7, I can tell you that people come down to that club lounge and grab coffee and print 24 hours a day,” Bloom said.
For Bloom, the case for both solutions is an easy one to make.
“One hundred percent, I would absolutely champion either one,” he said. “I think it’s important that you know your demographic and how you pick out what to offer.”
At 2400 Chestnut, PrintWithMe and SipWithMe prove that amenities don’t have to be elaborate to make a big impact. Both give residents essential services that fit naturally into their daily routines, while giving the on-site team fewer supplies, service needs, and resident requests to manage.
Want amenities that do more for residents and demand less from your team? See how PrintWithMe and SipWithMe can make life better in your community.
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