Latest Marketing Strategy to Fill Up Vacancies in Apartments

[Dan Handford]

Apartment Community Facebook Pages - Useless?

Many of your larger communities may have a presence on Facebook with a "Facebook Page" or something like this but unless you begin using it to it's fullest extent then it will be worthless.

One of our property managers on one of our properties (140+ units) has been testing some really cool ideas on using the Facebook Marketplace to attract potential residents with great success.

Another one our properties has been doing some testing as well with not much success.

So today we decided to have both community managers (CMs) get together to compare notes as to why one is working and the other is not.

Here are the result:

Facebook Marketplace to Attract New Residents

When you have the community Facebook page created, you will want to assign the community manager (CM) as the admin for the page so she/he can have the page join several different groups within the marketplace itself.

The CM on the one asset was only posting the vacant units/pics on the generic marketplace page and was getting very little traction. 

In order to make it more effective, you must have the page/CM join several local to the property community groups that allow you to post about vacant units. 

The one CM that was having success had 6 people come tour the property when she posted the weekend prior and 5 of those that come to tour signed leases! WIN! Score!

We are now implementing this strategy on all of our properties to increase occupancy. 

Halloween/October-Related Retention Events

You should also consider hosting a few community events for your residents to renew more leases and I wrote a BP article today to give you some ideas on this route. Click here to read the article.

What other strategies have you been using lately to increase retention and also increase the traffic to your properties for leasing up your units?