Topic: Do you drive traffic to your PMC site or your property site?

We are in the process of creating new marketing collateral for our properties and we of course want to drive traffic to our website. For your business cards, print flyers, brochures, etc - do you print your property management companies' website - and then have visitors toggle through to the exact property they are searching for - or do you list the property specific website? (We are fortunate enough to have simple property URLs that are very close to the name of the property - like www.springfordapts.com for Springford Apartments. I am in marketing and I would like to see the management company's site be the one printed - it makes it much nicer for me to look at metrics of where traffic flows, and it serves to brand the business as a whole instead of little pieces.

What do you do?

Thank you for your feedback!

Great question. I'm hoping someone will reply. We just developed a new web site for our company,but I questioned whether for resident marketing,is it better to put resources into property specific web sites

I am no expert in this area, so take it with a grain of salt. Your Management Company's webiste serves a duel purpose: to get more business and to promote its services. It should have a "button" for the Properties it manages and it should have a resident portal button to link to that property's website. The Management Company is the branded image it wishes to present. However, those searching for a community in which to live will likely want to get to the community's website.

Each property in the portfolio will want to have its own mini web page/site so potential residents can find them and show them why it's great to live there. Offering the option to apply online, pay rent online, place maintenance requests online - all good! This should link to the corporate website. Both the onsite and the corporate website pages should have all the buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and anything else they want to link with to get exposure.

Our onsite professionals' business cards have their property web address on them and their email contact info. I think you could just put their email contact info on them if you are third party managing. You can also brand the business cards with XYZ Property (local connection), a SUCHNSUCH community (corporate name).

You can track traffic through some of the ILS listings with specific telephone numbers, etc. That seems to be somewhat effective in knowing that someone came from your property website, the corporate website, Apt Guide, For Rent, etc. Real Page, Yardi, Property Solutions all offer this kind of linking to track traffic sources. (Or, at least I think they do.) You would need to review your budget and see where you can put your marketing dollars and get the most bang for your bucks. Again - not an expert and there are a ton of others who are way more knowledgeable than I!