Advertising

mobile home university
1

Any ideas on how to best advertise lots for rent and mobile home rentals. The local paper is expensive. Any would be appreciated.

Thanks

2

Scroll,

In terms of marketing I would recommend you be open to trying as many of these as feasible and keep track of what works vs. what does not. Every market is a bit different. Techniques the work in one park do not in another. Some ideas are:

  • Craigslist - its free, fast and you can adapt your ads quickly

  • Facebook, Youtube advertising - I have not done this but other park owners do a great job selling homes this way

  • Big banners on your street/sign - We get great response from people driving by our park and seeing some sort of advertising banner; it can be anything like “Move in Special” or “Handyman Special” or “Rent to Own”. These are usually 4x8 vinyl banners.

  • Bandit signs

  • Pass notices to your residents about referral bonuses - many people in park are family members or friends

  • Old fashioned tear-off posters in your local grocery store bulletin board

  • Mailers to local apartments, especially cruddy apartments with high rents

Try any or all of these and see what works.

3

We have found that the best advertising has been the “For Sale By Owner” sign in the window.

Second best is to ask our best tenants for referrals - anyone who bought a home that they referred gave them 1-months free rent. --One individual gave us 8 people so he received 8-months free lot rent - it was well worth it. He is now Manager of the MHP. The bad residents are not asked for any referrals.

Third in our pecking order is craigslist, although in our market there are not too many who are computer literate.

Thrifty Nickel or Little Nickel weekly paper that is free in front of most dept or grocery stores.

We have also found that in most areas there is a Hispanic population that are looking to buy a home and not just be a renter. We put all the info on an excel spread sheet with price down payment and interest rate we will carry back. There is also a choice of 3-yr, 4-yr, 5-yr financing options with what the monthly payment is and they can choose the one that works for them. The spreadsheet is then posted at the local Spanish Market store and anyone who buys a home the store gets the 1-months lot rent amount paid to them as a referral fee.

We do not allow renters and everyone seems to appreciate that as 9 times out of 10 the problems seem to arise from renters.

Dale

4

Our experience has been:

  • CraigsList pulls in 2/3rds of our leads and is free

  • A basic 3-line ad in our local paper is $98/month and pulls in the other 1/3rd of our leads. Newspaper readers may be slightly older and more responsible than the leads that come in off CL, but pretty similar

  • We tried bandit signs and our phone started ringing off the hook. The only problem was these leads were noticeably lower-income and lower credit. We also got a call from the local government saying bandit signs were illegal. So we stopped advertising this way for both of these reasons.

  • We’ve not tried ThriftyNickel or similar publication because, inexplicably, they are not published in our area (Oklahoma). But we hear good things about them where they are available.

  • We’ve had no difficulty keeping 95% - 100% full month after month, so have not ventured into notices on bulletin boards. This also seems like it would require more labor to coordinate driving to grocery stores, etc. to post them. CraigsList is so easy and works so well, there is little incentive for us to try anything else.

Your mileage may vary,

-Jefferson-