Topic: What's in a name?

Believe it or not the most traffic coming to your apartment website is not from searches like "apartments in los angeles" or "las vegas apartments" etc. The most traffic comes from searching for your community name and/or your community name and state. So do the most to get your name out there in the community, enhance your brand and image on your website and across various social media outlets and ILS's. If you are in the process of starting a new lease up, make sure to google the name you are planning to use first, it is better to have a unique name then to fight for rankings against a community in your area with a similar name. If anyone else has any other suggestions or points of view I would love to here them. Thanks everyone!

This is a mixed bag and I am just going to give my humble opinion here which does not mean it is the only way. First I say one has to look at are they being managed by the owner or a management company and they how big are they. There are some management companies that have properties in multiple states and they are in like the top 100 management companies in the United States and they you have the smaller ones which may have only one property. So the approach to getting a property name out there will be different.

All of the points brought up are things to look at, but then it also depends on how big, and how much capital do they have to spend on marketing and on the money that they spend will they see a return on their investments?

Small commmunities do not have the same capital to spend and may need to use different methods to get them exposure. This then comes down to the experience of the personnel in charge of these facitities. When properties talk to me or management companies about getting exposure, then I give them the free areas first and then talk to them about the ones they pay for. When talking community names of properties the larger management companies/owners have a process. The smaller ones for sure will need to be inovative.

If this were the case, my property would never be found. A small percentage of my inquiries can't even pronounce or name. Most people can't spell it.

However, I get plenty of calls. I'm known around town as the "blue and white apartments down the street from the hospital."

Don't have a road frontage sign, either.

Yet, for 3 straight years I have been 100% occupied with a waiting list most of the

Sandy at Kensington

Thank you Sandy and Nate for your input. In my personal experience and the data I have seen for over thousands of communities, the overall web traffic comes from google searches for the name of the community and usually the city and state.

Sandy, that is interesting to know about how people think of your community as the "blue and white apartments down the street from the hospital", that is definitely a good thing to know and if you have a website it might be a very useful keyword. It seems like your community is doing excellent and word of mouth and great property management is keeping that property 100% occupied which is definitely a fundamental necessity. Congrats!

I agree with you Nate on the points you made. Not all of the smaller communities should necessarily invest in certain marketing aspects and definitely any marketing tool that is free should definitely be looked into and pushed first.

Thank you to both of you for responding and if anyone else has any input/experience I am sure everyone would be glad to hear it. Happy Monday everyone!