The Four Things Your Property Management Website Needs to Accomplish

A website is an absolute must for a property management firm.

Without one, you’re essentially advertising your backwardness to the younger, tech-savvy generation of renters — and you’re making it unnecessarily difficult for owners to find you and hire you.

The 4 Things a Property Management Website Must Say

But just having a website isn’t enough — your website has to do things for you. Here are the most basic four of those functions:

1. Tell People Who You Are and What You Do

This might sound as easy as writing ‘Royal Rose Property Management’ on the top of your website.

That’s who and what, right? Well, yes, actually. That’s exactly what we mean. There’s no need to go into big bullet point lists describing the job of a property manager — save that for Wikipedia.

People who are looking for a PM already know what a PM does; they just want to know that they’ve found one. On the other hand, your firm’s name may not really say what you do, so you’ll need to offer a bit more to make sure visitors get the point.

2. Tell People Why You’re The Right Choice

This is the heart of marketing right here. If you can’t explain to your potential clients what sets you apart from the other PMs in your area, you won’t earn their attention.

Every business should have a unique selling proposition (USP); yours needs to be readily available on your website — either on the homepage or a single (well-labeled) click away. People who want to know what makes you better than the competition should be able to instantly figure out how to get that information.

Once they get there, they’re going to want to see all of the things that you do differently and what makes you better because of those choices.

This isn’t the place to mention your list of services — you have a Services page for that, generally — it’s the place to mention how you perform your services differently, and why it matters.

For example, if you unabashedly approach all of the neighbors around each of the properties you manage and give them magnets with your phone number and a reminder of a $20 award if they alert you to a suspicion that ends up saving you money, say so!

3. Tell People What to Do Next to Move Forward With You

Once people have identified you and figured out that you’re the people that they want to run with, they need to know how to go about doing the running.

Many experts claim that virtually every page on your website have some sort of call to action on it, but the truth is that if you’re too pushy, they might well decide you’re money-grubbing and decide on a different PM.

Fortunately, the people who come to your website looking for a property manager generally aren’t terribly stupid — so as long as every page has a very clear link to the Contact Us page, and the landing pages themselves do actually have calls to action, you’re generally good.

You can also disguise secondary calls to action as “download our pamphlet,” which of course will give them more reasons to hire you and include your contact information.

4. Actually Convince People to Move Forward With You

This function is slightly different than the rest, because each of the others has a single functional element of the website associated with it.

This one is more vague: your website as a whole needs to be designed in a way that convinces visitors that you’re professional and you know your business. In short, you should be using A/B or, if you’ve got the money to hire the right company, multivariate testing to constantly refine your website and improve your conversion rates.

If you have these four elements, your website will turn into the kind of asset you’ve wanted it to be since the Internet was invented.

Do you have a website?

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.