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Home Insider Blogs Mark Juleen's Blog Who Are Your Comps, Really? A New Twist.
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Feb 20
2009

Who Are Your Comps, Really? A New Twist.

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Posted by: Mark Juleen on Feb 20, 2009 01:00

Gabiele Preston has a great post about surveying your residents/prospects to find out who your competition is.  I'm a huge fan of surveying and encourage everyone to do so for better demographics, and to just improve your operations.

After reading her title and thinking about this idea a bit more I'd like to add a new twist to the "Who are your comps, really?" idea.  While other communities can be your competition, it may be a bit short sighted to think they are your main competition.  Actually, the way I view it, they are a secondary level of competition.  With 90% of customers going online to do apartment research and search maybe the question we need to ask ourselves is if our comps are actual apartment communties or the ILS's instead? 

While we hope these tools help lead customers to us, we're also bulked together with all the other communities that are considered our competition.  Maybe our main competition is making sure the customers find our websites first or find them at all.  From our corporate websites or community sites we have the opportunity to sell more value and truly show off what we have to offer.  With the ILS's all the communities get lumped together, and it's difficult to differentiate ourselves.  Especially in the case where a customer narrows their search using price as factor.  Your listing may never show up just based on prices.  Does that mean that you really aren't a community for them to consider?  I don't think so, but unfortunately your community was filtered out because of 1 factor.

I'm not saying the ILS's are not helpful and they don't bring us traffic, but it is difficult to build value for your communities on these sites.  If we're all just boxes with prices then the ILS's  are great, but I know for many of us we are so much more.  It is important to know the features and benefits you have vs. other apartment communities, but in today's apartment searches it's critical your websites are found among the ILS listings on Yahoo! and Google.  Both search engine optimization and search engine marketing needs to be done to compete.  So ask yourself today where you think your company or community website stacks up against your 1st level of competition, the ILS's.

 Thanks and enjoy your day!

Mj


Comments (3)Add Comment
62
written by Brent Williams, February 20, 2009
That's a really interesting concept, Mark. I wonder how many people view their referral source as a point of competition? Generally, referrals are just a way of increasing the size of your "net", although with additional costs. But now, we have situations where your net could have potentially caught these prospects, but the company's website was slow to the punch. So these types of referrals aren't necessarily increasing the scope of your presence, but just taking a cut because they were better at getting to your audience first... Very interesting post!
333
written by Kim Andreadis, February 20, 2009
Mark,

I agree; one apartment community web-site is competing with another. Many customers who may have been categorized previously as callers or "walk-ins", are first googling, asking and searching on line. If the web-site isn't optimized, thay will not find you. If they do find you, the web-site itself presents differentiation in the way the information is presented.

The practice of "driving around" the area to get an idea about the best place to live has become "navigating the web" instead.

What are some of your best practices for SEO?
Respectfully,

Kim Andreadis
67
written by Mark Juleen, February 20, 2009
@Brent It's mainly a value position for me. If a customer finds one of my communities using an ILS, then our property is just another box among boxes with a square footage and a price. The best way for us to create value for our communities is with a custom approach, and there are few opportunities to do so on an ILS page. Even if a customer finds homeisjchart.com first and then goes on to an ILS to continue their search, we could argue that our communities will have established a better value position than our competition (as they will likely only be viewed on the ILS).

@Kim Thanks for the comment Kim. For SEO I would recommend doing 2 things.

1. Start using Pay-per-click SEM. It's a good investment and you can set a small budget just to start out until you get more comfortable with your ads and keywords. Just having a Google account for SEM will really help you to identify keyword searches you should dial in on.

2. I recommend giving www.Hubspot.com a try. Long term you may not see the benefit of being an ongoing member, but the initial website grading tools, keyword tools, and recommendations can really help point people in the right direction to optimize their websites.
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