Here’s another opinion on the value and ethics of a test ad before / after you have a park under contract.
Think of the following scenario. You have a park in an metro area (of size X, whatever is appropriate). Now you are looking at a second park in the same metro area. Typically you won’t be the only park in town. You want to place the same ad you already placed, right? Because the draw to your potential second park has the same radius of “seek” as your current park. So you look at the results of your ads for your current park. Is that legitimate? Ethical? Your competitors are likely advertising. Take a look at what’s already out there. What is the “market?”
You would probably be wise to run a new test ad, just in case. Still ethical? What if you don’t bother to tabulate and categorize the responses? What if you don’t call anyone back? What if you never intend to call anyone back but just see how many times the phone rings? Still ethical?
Now, what if you’re buying the second park without the first park? The test ad is not just a sample of the demand, it is the demand. Or at least your last-resort source of leads.
If the phone isn’t ringing when you want it to, you have to know what the problem is. That’s not something you want to be diagnosing after-the-fact. You want to start collecting a wait list during the first month of operating your park. How are you going to know how fast/many & what type of homes you are going to bring in, at what price points, without this wait list?
In practice, for us, the large expense comes during DD when we visit the park. We picked a geographic area, then a state, then got a feeling for a few regions of the state during our various DD trips. We looked at a lot of parks before purchasing one in a town where we are comfortable looking to buy another.
A corollary is that you ought to keep your ad as generic as possible – your ad could be for any mobile home park in the entire area, because, essentially, it is. The ad measures demand in the area; how much of that demand you can tap into is all about management – not basic economic factors over which you have no control.
For non-urban metro areas, I have found that the county seat is generally the largest metro area in a given county, and for a given group of counties there are only a few county seats that are thriving. So outside of (for example) Indianapolis there is a ring of counties (say, 6) with a county seat and a few other metro areas, and maybe a couple of county seats have their own well-read newspaper. But you should be advertising in the Indianapolis paper and that would be the same ad for anyone willing to commute to Indianapolis, therefore valid for hundreds of potential parks in the Indy metroplex.
By the time you get “two counties out”: The county seat is the only metro area in each county, the commuters are commuting one or two counties away but not to Indianapolis, and you are “on the way” between Indy and the next metroplex or along an interstate or major highway. Now your draw is going to be whatever economic base depends on land that is along the corridor between two major metroplexes. Good luck figuring out where to advertise. Once you figure it out, if you aren’t getting the demand response you like (see title of this thread) it’s time to pass. How are you going to maintain a wait list? You will want one because there will always be at least some turnover.
Brandon@Sandell