A lot of what we do at TheOnsiteManager, is market complex rentals, and residential sales for onsite managers like you. In fact our office markets thousands of listings per year for onsite managers. So it’s safe to say, we do a lot of marketing. One of the questions I get asked time and again by our managers is how to generate more enquiries from marketing. Here’s what I’ve learned.
The first thing to remember is that RealEstate.com.au’s search results are very clean. In fact there’s only 2 things you can edit that display in the search results: the rent (or sale price) and the main photograph.Basically, those are the ONLY 2 places you can get your message across to prospects that this is a viable property for them. If you waste this opportunity, prospects will scroll straight past your listing without a second glance, so don’t blow it!!!
One thing I’m often telling managers is to NOT use a photograph of a toilet, or a garage roller door, or the inside of a grubby old cupboard, as their main image. The first image shown in the listing is the ‘hero image’: this is the money shot! This is your one opportunity to drive traffic INTO your listing. Always take the time to carefully select your hero image, and try and think of it from the tenant’s perspective. If you have a nice pool area, or a BBQ area, or manicured gardens, run with that! Tenants love pools, and everyone wants to live somewhere nice. Never use the toilet, or the laundry or the garage as your main image – ever!! Not even if it’s gold plated and autographed by Micheal Jackson himself, may he rest in peace.
Hire a professional photographer – it’s the best investment you can possibly make in your marketing! REAL SCOPE in Brisbane ( http://www.realscope.com.au/ ) can do a 16 image photoshoot for $180 – it works out to less than $12 an image. Professional images are correctly lit, straight, in focus and they make properties look desirable and managers look professional. As an onsite manager, you only need to do 1 shoot of your complex one-time and you’re set forever! You can use the same images over and over again. There’s no excuse not to spend this very small amount of money for a series of fantastic marketing images that will last for years. Remember to keep detailed and organised folders on your computer of all your quality images and ad copy so you can easily and quickly recreate ads in future. This sort of organisation will also pay dividends when it comes time to sell your Management Rights. (And remember to keep backups – hard drives do fail!)
Having professional images of your complex is great, but what about the apartment itself? It’s probably not viable to hire a professional photographer every time a listing comes up for rent, but there’s still plenty you can do to correct your images so they look clean and appealing. There’s a company called Box Brownie ( https://www.boxbrownie.com/ ) who can deliver stunning image enhancements like the one used in the header of this article for just $3US an image. That’s less than a cup of coffee… consider using them to enhance the internal shots that are specific to each listing. They can also generate sensational 3D floor plans for $30US. It’s chump-change and the impact they will have on your enquiry rate will be dramatic. Not to mention how much more professional you’ll appear to your investors.
Also consider approaching your owner to pay for upgraded listings. Standard listings quickly fall to the back of search results and get lost really fast. If your owner doesn’t want to pay to upgrade the listing, they need to realize that they have a VERY narrow marketing window as a standard listing to attract a tenant before their advertising will become ineffective. They may want to consider asking for less rent or including a week or two of free rent to get interest during this narrow window when people are seeing their ad. If you do include some sort of special offer with the listing, remember to add it to the rental display field! This will show the offer with the price in the search results. For example “$550 per week, 2 weeks rent free!”, remember the photography and the rent are the only 2 details shown in search results that you can control, so make sure you use the rent display field to make it clear there is a special offer included.
If the owner does want to upgrade their listing (and I personally always do this with my own property – it is effective!) RealEstate.com.au orders search results in the following way from newest to oldest:
Premier
Highlight
Feature
Standard
Premiers are massive with huge branding. They come at a fairly high cost and in my opinion they are for agents trying to sell multi-million dollar mansions or rent luxury homes. They aren’t really suitable for our managers so much. We’ve never listed a Premier in the 10 years we’ve been with REA.
Highlights are almost as massive as Premiers, and they’re actually pretty good value these days. If you book one, chances are it will be at the very top of page 1 or very close to it. They drive a lot of enquiries and are very effective. They are normally about $300 a month.
Features are about $130 a month and load after the highlights. They are also quite effective at keeping your listing closer to the front of results. Plus they’ll show any inspection times and also your direct contact details right from the search results, which is nice.
Standard listings are after this, they are included in the realestate.com.au subscription cost. They usually start on page 2 depending on where you’re searching. This can be an issue because a considerable proportion of RealEstate.com.au users never scroll past page 1. If your ad is a few months old and you’re struggling to find a tenant, you will NEED to upgrade because the older your ad becomes, the less effective it will be.
Every time a new listing becomes available in your building, create a new, separate listing for it and keep it running for the duration of the vacancy, don’t just update the same old ad you’ve been using for 3 years… this is a sure-fire way to make your ad fall to the very back of results… and get you no results. Also remember not to delete your ad until the tenant has paid the deposit as you will not be allowed to re-create it at the same address if they pull out within 90 days of the ad being posted.
If you’re an onsite manager, talk to us today about how TheOnsiteManager can market rentals and residential sales within your complex. We’d love to hear from you! Call us on 07 3868 4047 today!