Evaluating ad results

I put up a test ad, it’s run for 6 days, and I’ve gotten 9 calls (along with one text message and three emails).

I haven’t run a lot of test ads, but that seems a little weak?

A little backstory: the lot rents are quire high at $360, so I ran the test ad at $550 for a 2bed/1bath 672sqft home which I figured would allow the park to break even on its rehabs (there are some 12x56s abandoned on site).

The park is located in an awesome suburb outside of a mediocre city. Even though the city is so-so the single family houses across the street from the park are selling for $160,000-$200,000. I thought the demand would be through the roof in such an expensive neighborhood.

Main city - 115,000 pop 76k median house, my zip - 20k population 127k median house price.

Also, a small disclaimer, these ads were run in just craigslist and apartments.com. The local newspaper classifieds appears to be dying, with only 3 rental property ads running. Two phone calls to the classifieds to place an ad went no where with a busy signal.

Any thoughts on these test results?

It’s not terrible, but also not great. I would tweak your ad and let it run 10 more days.

A 2/1 mobile should be competitive with a 1/1 or studio in traditional housing. Your price may be so low that it’s throwing people off (e.g. “it must be a scam”) so you may want to double check it to see that it’s competitive.

I would also do postlets and also consider bandit signs at major nearby intersections if you think it is merited. Are you specifying the exact location or just a general area in the town (the latter is preferable for testing general affordable housing demand). I always include like 1 or 2 representative photos just so people have an idea what they’re getting, and seems to have a positive influence in general.

What are the vacancy numbers - especially vacant for rent on bestplaces?

We can review your ad if you like…take out anything confidential. :smile:

Thanks for the response!

I tagged the exact location of the park.

Bestplaces and rentometer have the two bedroom pricing at $650 and $675 for the area, so $550 may be a bit on the high end since mobile homes are typically cheaper than other rentals.

The vacancy rates on bestplaces for the zip code is 5.17% vs 12.47% national, unemployment 6.1%. The main city nearby is 13% vacant and 8.4% unemployment.

The lot rent seems really high for such low general rent prices. With a 350 lot rent I expect a 2/2 to rent for at least 800 dollars. How much vacancy does this Park have? If it’s high then you may have trouble filling it and need to ask yourself if you need to come down on lot rent to fill it up. For $550 the economics are really tough - you might have better luck advertising a cash buyer of the home for 10K or something like that…

Regardless I would try additional mediums to get the word out. You can also try an ad in the paper for the larger metro. With the vacancy numbers you posted your phone should be ringing off the hook.

Thank jhutson,
This park is the cheapest in the submarket with $360 lot rent (park pays water/sewer), with the other parks ranging from $387-$502 + submetered water/sewer, and the other parks are 90%-100% full (although the other parks are all higher quality and larger than the park I have under contract).

Rather than trying to maximize marketing I’m considering the dropping the deal since the price isn’t amazing, I was willing to take a slightly higher price since I thought the really good market would leave a lot of upside in boosting vacancy easily.

I’m going to retool the ad a little bit and see what kind of response comes through. I’ll post it up soon.

Something that we’ve found is that there are simply some markets where craigslist just doesn’t pull as well as other forms of marketing. For example, one of our parks only pulled about 15-20 calls on a 10 day run. However, we put out 25 bandit signs after we bought it, and it pulled almost 80 calls in a single day. I’m not really going to attempt to try to explain that, but that’s been our experience. Everywhere we own a park, bandit signs pull 10x more calls than any other form of marketing.

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Thanks Charles,
Would you mind expanding on the bandit signs you’ve used?:
-Where did you put them?
-Did you have your manager put them up?
-Did you have your signed professionally printed?
-Any other tricks that got you better results?

We use the absolute cheapest ones we can find and put them on streets and at intersections with high traffic counts. The manager is responsible for writing them and putting them out. We usually only need to do this for a few months. After you get everything full, you can stop putting them out and driving your manager nuts with answering calls all day.

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One caution on this is that you will occasionally get a call from the inspector. We’ve never really had any real problems on this (think about how many of these things are out there), but you’ll want to comply if they are adamant about you not doing this. In one of our parks, the inspector told us that if we put them out Friday evening and picked them up Sunday evening, we’d likely never hear from him again… hint,hint Any other time we’ve received a similar call, it’s always pertained to a particular part of town. One of those, it’s ok in this part of town but not that part of town.

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@CharlesD what incentives or temporary pay do you have to provide your manager to field 80 calls per day? Seems like they would be really unhappy with a few months of that…

I have been thinking about ways to lessen the workload with tire kickers such as a custom voicemail, “Thank you for your interest in our mobile homes at 10150 MHP Lane. You may see more pictures of the units and download the application at our website www.blahblahblah.com. Alternatively please leave your name, phone number, and email address and we will send you an information pack and application to return to us and we would be happy to show you the units afterwards…” Then have the manager jot it down on a log and email the stuff out.

Does anyone else use a better system? Oh the burdens of excessive demand.

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His incentive is $500 for every home he sells for cash. (We provide him with the cash price for every vacant home) YTD, I’ve paid him $2,500 in commissions (5 cash sales). That first bonus check was very motivating for him. We try to stay away from rent-credit in this park and therefore, he is not incentivized to do these at the moment.

Another thing is that our call system starts with a message. The perspective resident has to listen to the whole thing in order to figure out which extension to push to get the manager. This eliminates most of the druggies, felons, and looky-loos. If someone is willing to listen to a 1min long message, then they are probably somewhat serious about getting into a unit.

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Question: How do you set up the bandit signs if you are the DD phase of a park and don’t live close by? Do you send them to someone and pay them to put up and take down? If so how much do you pay them?