It’s no surprise that 99.9 percent of our lease applicants find us through digital real estate websites. Because an online presence is so important to securing new tenants, you might be wondering if you should also consider amping up your digital marketing to fill vacant units. Read on for some insight into this question.
Hit the Hot Spots
For many single-family and multi-family properties, extra digital marketing efforts are not going to have much of an impact on vacancy. For the most part, when you’re marketing a vacancy for smaller properties, the only thing you need to do from a marketing perspective is make sure the rental listing is showing up on the right real estate listing websites like Zillow, Trulia and HotPads.
Property management companies like ours rely on property management software to automatically push our listings out to these and about 20 or so other rental listing websites. You can also sign up for a paid account so your properties achieve prominence on the site.
Generally, as long as you have good photos, a good description of the property and are available to take showings, this amount of digital marketing is enough to fill a vacant unit (to learn more about how to improve your rental property’s digital marketing, read on here.
What’s in Your Wheelhouse?
Big apartment companies with hundreds and hundreds of units are likely doing more digital marketing (they’re also the ones out there who are more likely offering incentives to applicants. They have a dedicated staff to manage their marketing efforts.
If this is in your wheelhouse and makes sense financially, go for it, but for many individual property owners, extra digital marketing is not necessary as long as the marketing you are doing is being done well.
To hear more about our conversation about digital marketing and real estate, tune in to Season 1, Episode 17 of our podcast Owner Occupied.
