Attracting Hispanic residents to park

We recently purchased a park in the Atlanta metro market which has a strong hispanic population. Currently, we are in the turnaround phase of the community and our hopes are to predominately fill it with hispanic residents but we aren’t having much luck with attracting them. We have a bilingual manager so there’s not language barrier with communication to prospective spanish speaking residents.What we’ve done so far to market to the hispanic market:* Bandit Rent-To-Own signs with Se Habla Espanol’* Spanish flyers placed at all laundromats around town* Craigslist adsDon’t get me wrong, we’re getting a ton of calls from our marketing efforts, but we’ve only had one new hispanic resident move-in over the past 45 days.I’m looking for suggestions on what others have successfully done to reach this target audience. FYI, our park has newer/nicer homes than most of the other parks in the area and we’re very competitive with our pricing so I’m positive this isn’t the issue.Any help/tips/tricks would be greatly appreciated.ThanksKevin

When you say a “bilingual” manager, is the manager hispanic or non-hispanic?

She’s hispanic.

What part of Atlanta? There are local Hispanic news papers you can advertise in. They are distributed throughout local retail businesses. You can also try putting flyers in other local Hispanic businesses.

Just for clarity, I want to point out that, under Fair Housing, you cannot try to force your tenant base into being Hispanic – you have to allow everyone who applies the same opportunity. However, that’s not to say that you can’t improve your marketing to the Hispanic demographic, and adding the Hispanic newspapers would be a logical test. You need to make sure that you are also in the major metro newspaper promoting in your advertisement that “se habla espanol”. 

Jonesboro/Hampton area. I was planning on advertising in a few of the hispanic publications, but then I called one of the apartment ads which advertised in 2 of the 3 most popular publications to see if I could speak with a leasing agent regarding how successful there ads are in getting new tenants for their building and she said that the ads didn’t bring her much business. I haven’t tried the flyers in local businesses, but I’m thinking that will be next on my list of things to do. 

Don’t based your decision on apartment’s experiences – you are offering the exact opposite of apartments, and what works for them (Apartment locators, etc.) will not work for you.

If your current population in the park is Hispanic you could offer referral fees for any new tenants that they refer.

Do a mass mailing to Hunters Ridge!

Maybe your target market isn’t interested in living in your park in which case you need to consider a different target.