Apartment Marketing Cited Source Comparison

So, who's getting the biggest slice of the pie?  As budget season approaches I'm doing my mid-year study of marketing data that we collect here at J.C. Hart.  In the past I have mentioned how I think it's important to not just review data month over month, but to also look at it year over year and over a series of years.  I typically will look back 4 years and also pull year-to-date numbers to see if we have any trends for the current year as well.  What's most interesting about my analysis this year is that 2007 was the last year before our big shift to online and social media.  We'd always had a company website and we've listed on numerous ILSs for years, but we really began to shift our marketing investment in 2008. The following data is a summary of all J.C. Hart Apartment Communities leasing records for 1st marketing source cited by a new move-in.

Back in 2007 you will see that Print Guide marketing contributed a little over 10% of our leasing, and the ILSs contributed nearly 20%.  Unfortunately, nearly 60% of our marketing spend was going to Print Guides and ILSs.  At this time, Craigslist was barely a blip on the radar, but we saw the majority of our leases coming from good old Drive By and Referrals.  When I looked at these numbers back in 2007 I remember thinking to myself, "Self, why do we spend most of our marketing $ on these sources and nearly nothing on Drive By, Referrals, or our own Property Websites?"  It was somewhat of an epiphany for me.  What else could we do with that money?  We did have property websites in 2007 (that I thought were great at the time), but they were only cited by 1.4% of our new move-ins.  Something definitely needed to be done there.  Bottom line, the spend seemed oddly weighted, and I knew there had to be a better way.

So onward we went into 2008 with a new plan.  That plan included dropping one print source and reinvesting about 50% of that savings into: beginning a new website initiative, starting to use Google Adwords, and the beginning of our strategy to incorporate social media into our marketing.  In addition, we launched test properties using a revenue management system for our pricing.  It was kind of amazing what else we could do with those dollars.  The shift wasn't dramatic, but we began to see our Property Websites and Referrals make up for the downward trending Print Guides.

In 2009 the real shift happened.  We saw our Property Websites completely cover and take over for what was once attributed to print for our leases.  We had dropped another Print Guide that year and invested into more website tools, more social media efforts, more Adwords, began some basic strategy Craigslist posting, and we also added some additional ILS listings we had not previously been in.  Our Property Website leases jumped from 5.7% to 10.6% of the marketing sources, Referrals 24.7% to 26.9%, and ILSs 16.2% to 17.7%.

And then just last year in 2010 we began to reduce our spend with ILSs and adopted a strategist Craigslist plan using the RentSentinel Marketer tool.  All-the-while investing more into social media as well.