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Jul 27
2009
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A Submarkets' Buying Habits - The single most important money saving and lease producing practice.
I am still astonished to find that multi-unit properties do not collect market information from each and every lead. This is what I mean:
Say an apartment property manager is responsible for advertising (which is usually the case). This property manager even with training starts advertising in the most common places.
- Newspapers
- Apartmentfinder.com
- Rent.com
- Local Magazines
- Craigslist
- etc.
This is a good start as naturally they will start receiving leads from each of these ad sources. GREAT!...
The big problem is many apartment managers stop here. They focus on the normal common places for advertising and get mediocre results at best, but here is where they can make the most difference by asking a six word question.
"Where did you hear about us?"
This question is empty however if the data collected from it is not quantified and analyzed. This data will allow you to track how many leads are coming from your ads, but are these leads going to leases? What if you are spending hundreds of dollars a month on something that is producing no leases?! Surprisingly, most property managers spend hundreds of dollars on ads that produce lots of leads but few leases.
One of my favorite examples of this is:
At a property in Fayetteville NC, the previous apartment manager poured hundreds of dollars into newspaper ads as they knew from experience that the newspaper ads created the most leads. Turns out, only 1/5 leads could even qualify (after background and credit check), and only 1/5 of each lead converted to a lease. That means that out of 100 leads, only 20 qualified and out of those 20 only 4 converted to leases. At this point in time, they were struggling at only 70% occupancy.
Today after much improvement, and eliminating costly low ROI ads they are holding steady at comfortable 92% occupancy with 96% pre-leased.
Here comes the second phase, all you have to do is add a single question to your lease.
"Where did you hear about us?"
If you can get your apartment manager to carefully collect and quantify these two valuable pieces of information, you will be on your way to eliminating costly ads that produce little end results.
The final piece to this equation is to get rid of low ROI ads, and invest the money you saved in new creative ads. I encourage all of you to invest your time in new ad sources such as the internet, social networking sites, free internet listing sites, etc.
Our apartment marketing solution strategies incorporate this into every single tenant lead and online rental application that is received. Good Luck!
I hope that this is helpful,
Sergio Navarrete
