Topic: Mulit Family Online Marketing Firms

Hi!

Does anyone hire a marketing firm that manages all of your online presence on Zillow/Trulia/Street Easy/Apartments.com?

We do all of our leasing through brokers and they do a terrible job keeping the online platforms up to date and looking good. We were thinking of managing all of the platforms ourselves and sending leads to brokers.

When managing it ourselves, we envision adding the 3d tours, better photos, up to date pricing, nicely written descriptions and amenity articulation and overall a better online platform. We thought this through and decided that we dont want to add another person doing this on the payroll and rather hire an agency to do it.

Now the problem is finding an agency who can do it. NO one offers solely this service. They are all brokers who only want exclusives to do it.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!

We find that it is best to manage our ILSs in house. Our agents are responsible for updating the photos, content, specials, etc, each week. It really doesn't take a lot of time to manage it.

Best practice is not to out source this. If your paying an agency why not pay someone in your company and have full control. It is really best to have the onsite team update it or a marketing employee. Truly who is on the property know what is going on, what prices are and what pictures are the best. Train them how you would like it and they will succeed.

My company hired me 8 years ago to clean up all of our ILS sites, After you do the initial clean up they dont take much work to maintain. You can get back-end access for the majority of the sites to make changes yourself. We now have our site teams do an audit and send changes to the corporate office to update.