If you want your rental property to be successful and generate consistent income, you need to keep it occupied with tenants. And to attract those tenants, you need to market your rental property. That means putting your property in front of more people looking for a rental and making it seem as attractive as possible.
Unfortunately, most property owners make significant mistakes when marketing a rental property, ultimately compromising their ability to find tenants quickly (and in some cases, find tenants at all).
The good news is most of these mistakes are easily fixable once you acknowledge them.
The Importance of Rental Property Marketing
There’s no way to avoid rental property marketing. Unless you already have a line of tenants naturally interested in your property, this is the only way to attract people to your living unit. It can be time-consuming and expensive, but if it means getting a better tenant and getting that tenant in the door sooner, it’s usually worth the investment.
The Top Rental Property Marketing Mistakes
These are some of the biggest rental property marketing mistakes that landlords and real estate investors make:
- Starting without a strategy. How are you going to position this property? What are the unique selling points? How are you going to define success for this campaign? Excellent rental property marketing tactics all start with an overarching strategy. If you don’t have that strategy in place, or if you haven’t thought through your approach, you’re probably going to be disappointed in your results. This isn’t something you can improvise.
- Appealing to the wrong target audience. Marketing success, across all fields, depends on your ability to identify a target audience and reach them specifically. Generic, broad approaches rarely work in your favor because the messaging isn’t relevant and you end up wasting time and effort. It’s much better to specifically market to a single demographic or cohort; but even then, you can make the mistake of targeting the wrong demographic or cohort. Spend some time doing market research to understand what types of people would be most interested in your property, specifically, and devise strategies that will reach them.
- Using too many tools. There’s no shortage of tools on the market that can help you with marketing and advertising. Many of these tools are sleek, intuitive, and highly effective at what they do. They can automate elements of your marketing campaign and even provide suggestions for how to market your property. The problem is, it’s possible to use too many tools at once; doing so can quickly exhaust your budget and complicate your marketing efforts unnecessarily. Be more selective about the tools you use.
- Relying on only one channel or tactic. Facebook advertising can work. Classified listings can work. Direct mail can work. But if you dump all your time, money, and energy into only one channel or tactic, your strategy isn’t going to be as effective as it could be. It’s much better to take an Omni channel approach, tapping into the power of many different channels and tactics simultaneously. It’s an easy way to broaden your reach.
- Doing everything alone. If you’re inexperienced in the rental property marketing game, it’s a mistake to do everything by yourself. Instead, it’s best to work with a team of experienced marketers, including photographers, designers, writers, and ad campaign planners. Better yet, work with a property management company that can help you with every stage of the rental property marketing process.
- Using bad photos. Much of your success in rental property marketing depends on your ability to capture and distribute excellent photos of the property. Human beings are visual creatures, and we respond much better to photos than to written copy. Also, most people browse online listings before they even sign up to take a tour in person. If your photos aren’t clear, if you don’t have enough photos, or if your photos are unflattering, you’re instantly going to turn off your audience. Instead, it’s better to hire a professional photographer and take plenty of photos that show off the best features of your unit in a flattering light. You’ll know the photos are effective when you start generating more leads.
- Relying on cliches and generic copy. If you start browsing rental listings in your city, you’ll immediately start noticing commonalities. Rental property marketers often rely on the same, tired phrases to sell a property, like “ready for your imagination” or “this one won’t last” or “flooded by natural light.” These cliches and instances of generic copy aren’t necessarily bad, but they don’t help your listing stand out. Try to write something more original.
- Including no call to action (CTA). Your property may look amazing and you might do an excellent job selling it. But if your ads and listings don’t have strong calls to action (CTAs), your efforts will be for nothing. Most people won’t take action naturally; you need to give them a specific prompt that calls them to action. Encourage them to contact you and imply some degree of urgency.
- Failing to adjust. If you start marketing your property and you don’t see any leads after a couple of weeks, the solution isn’t to continuously run ads until you do start seeing leads. The solution is to adjust your strategy so you can potentially see better results. Be willing to swap out photos, switch channels, or otherwise change tactics.
- Neglecting your data. Pay close attention to the data you gather throughout the marketing process. How many people are seeing your ads? How many leads are you generating? How do your different tactics compare to one another? Only by studying the objective data will you be able to determine whether your tactics are successful – and make the positive changes necessary to see better results.
The Solution: Work With a Property Manager
If you want to avoid most of the problems that emerge when trying to market your rental property on your own, there’s an easy solution: hire a property manager like Green Residential.
At Green Residential, we take care of almost everything related to your property management, including property marketing, tenant screening, maintenance requests, rent collection, and even eviction. If you have a rental property in the Houston or Austin area, contact us for more information today!
Michael is Green Residential’s Vice President. He helps to keep the team organized and running smoothly. Prior to joining Green Residential, he spent 12 years working at Cadence Bank in the mortgage loan servicing department, where he specialized in loan audits, modifications, and bankruptcy-related issues for the mortgage portfolio.
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