May 2012

APARTMENT MARKETING TRENDS

THE IMPORTANCE OF MOBILE AND LOCAL SEARCH

If you've found a restaurant or retail store on line or with your Smartphone, you know that these technologies are changing the way people find products and services. Apartments are no exception. Industry experts say that over 70% of apartment renters are now starting their apartment search on line. Over 20% of internet searches for apartments are coming from mobile devices. Prospects are also visiting more websites and checking reviews prior to renting.

Google has recently made changes in its search algorithms that make local organic listings rank much higher than in the past. These changes allow individual properties to better compete for rankings with the big Internet Listing Services like Apartments.com, For Rent.com, etc. In order to effectively compete, we need to re-direct some of the properties' marketing spend to make sure we optimize on-line presence to drive prospects to the properties.

We also need to spend more time optimizing and refreshing the information on our websites. MEB made the change to Property Solutions for our property websites several months ago. We are very pleased with the increased rental activity we are seeing and encourage you to review results with your District Manager.   These websites are much more effective in driving traffic and increasing rentals. The websites do require significant upkeep and we've found that we're unable to properly maintain the sites and keep them fresh without spending several hours per month on each site.

Starting in May, we will adjust our marketing spends on each property so that appropriate time can be allocated to maintaining the sites and doing some very basic SEO efforts. Rather than paying an outside firm to do these activities or outsource them to Property Solutions, we have assigned Tanya Garcia to these duties and will portion out her cost to the properties at .34 cents per unit per month, not to exceed $110 per month. So, for a 200 unit property, the cost would be $68 per month. We feel that this is much more cost effective than vending these efforts out and we are certain that we'll see big dividends from Tanya's efforts.

If you'd like to see more information on local search, feel free to take a look at the presentation Melanie Morrison recently did on Local Search at the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference in Phoenix.

Below is a link to Melanie's full presentation, this can also be found on the Market Info section of the MEB website.

Melanie's Full Presentation 

For those of you who are tech-savvy, here are some of the areas we want Tanya to focus on:

1. Update the property's listing in Google Places and other large search engines.
2. Build local search citations through business directory sites such as Yelp, Foursquare, Merchant Circle, Manta, CitySearch, LocalEze, etc.
3. Markup Addresses in Schema and hCard.
4. Add a KML file and Geosite to websites.
5. Add more local-based content to websites.
6. Monitor reviews closely as reviews are a big factor in the rankings.
7. Monitor the sites activities on their Facebook page.

MEB BESTS THE COMPETITION

We were honored recently to learn that MEB is out-performing the competition in following up with prospects inquiring about rentals.    The company we use to conduct our team member shops, Business Observations, is probably the most prominent of the shopping firms in the state.   They recently sent us a chart showing we followed up on prospects 20% more often than the next competitor.   Here's the chart they provided.