It’s a no-brainer that you as a manager of any type of property would want to be able to drive traffic to your building as effectively as possible. If you can market well enough, you’ll have no trouble bringing in a variety of renters who were alerted to the opening in one way or another. If you aren’t advertising the available space very well, then you won’t have a lot of people come in to see it, almost as if no one knows that it’s available (and they likely don’t). Draw in potential tenants and renters with a few simple steps.
Marketing Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Building
Vacant units aren’t really good for anyone. You lose money and possible applicants lose out on a place to live. Avoid this unwanted situation by creating “high-quality listings” for whatever spaces you have to offer. Don’t be half-hearted about the advertising for any empty spaces on your property and instead put as many resources to use as you can to make sure that anyone who could apply will apply. You’ll see a rise in online traffic to start with and, hopefully, those browsers will then come to see the place in person. A detailed description of what is and isn’t included, along with a number of professional photographs, can make all the difference.
Most people who are apartment or office-hunting these days will do so primarily online, at least to start. Make sure that your newly-updated listing is hosted on some, if not all, if the popular space-searching sites. Depending on how big your property is, you may not be able to host for free on every site, but it’s usually worth the cost to do so anything to ensure that as many people as possible are looking over what you have to offer.
Why you’re already online, consider writing (or outsourcing the writing) a property management blog. You can produce tips for other property managers, advice for renters, or money-saving techniques for tenants. There is a huge variety of potential subject matter to keep people interested, informed, and even entertained, but that isn’t the real reason that you should be blogging. Producing regular, new, written content is really one of the best ways to boost web viewership and helps to keep your website appearing on search results. Consider a post a week from 300-500 words to help drive traffic to your building.
If you haven’t already invested in more serious online advertising, then you’re missing out on an enormous opportunity to spread the word about how great your property is and about any and all available units. “Pay per click” ads can work wonders in generating a buzz by getting the news out to those who are searching for relevant keywords. For example, if someone does a search for your city or area and “one bedrooms,” “pet-friendly buildings,” or “loft office space,” then you’ll be more likely to come up. As the name suggests, you won’t need to worry about paying for the ads unless the interested party physically clicks through to your site, in which case they’re at least seeing what you have to offer, which is certainly worth the money.
Concerned about your budget? Social media marketing can be both highly productive and free of charge. In fact, if you’re advertising available units, current tenants or renters will likely share those posts with others who may be interested in the space, effectively doing some of the leg work for you. Using social media in a big way may seem intimidating, but you can just stick to a few sites that are well-used, like Facebook and Twitter, and take things from there. Those two are such social media giants that you’ll likely get a big increase in traffic to your building after just using them! Create accounts and make sure to utilize each to their potential (i.e., using a lot of images on Facebook and keeping things brief on Twitter).
Finally, in keeping with the above tip, don’t forget that your current tenants or renters can act as excellent resources, too. Send a message to those who are currently on the property mentioning that there is space available, should they know of anyone who would be qualified to apply. It’s likely that at least one person will send on the message to others, again handling some of the brunt of the marketing for you. People like to be near other people that they know, so they will likely want to try and work or live near those people.
There is a lot for a property manager to worry about: working to fill vacancies and to drive traffic to your property are a big part of that. Don’t shoulder all of the work yourself and instead “recruit” the aid of a powerful software solution. Consider Budgetrac Property Management Software, which reduces costs by automating so much of the process, therefore saving you time. You can rely on Budgetrac to keep track of all aspects of your management work so that you can instead focus on marketing and drawing in people to fill vacant units.