Would love to hear what owners use for phone service at their parks. I know google voice is one of the favorites and I would have to agree but you cant get a local area code in many locations. We have tried magic jack plus and aboslutly hated it. Difficult to set up and would always go down. We have one park with Ooma and have been happy with it. Initial cost is high, approx $100 but then its only about $4 a month.
Any new technology out there to save money on phone service?
We use Grasshopper.com. Rates are $25/mo. - $50/mo. depending on call volume, which is principally driven by 1) the size of your community, and 2) whether there are a lot of POHs (e.g. high turnover).
The key advantage of Grasshopper over Google Voice is that it is a virtual PBX, not a ‘call forwarding’ solution like Google.
When one of our potential customers calls in, they hear a professional voice greeting (one-time $75 charge, or you can record your own greeting for $0) saying “Hello and welcome to XYZ Estates. For directions and hours of operation, press 0 (this forwards to a recording, which saves our managers a lot of time to not have to be constantly giving out this information). For someone who can tell you about our homes, press 1 (this forwards to our stay-at-home Mom who handles most of our calls from all the properties). For our on-site manager, press 2 (this forwards to the manager’s phone). For our corporate office, press 3.” (this forwards to us)
Google Voice is ‘only’ a call forwarding service to one phone number. All calls will come to you (or end up in the Google voicemail system). As you scale, you really will not want all those calls coming to you, so you’ll grow out of Google Voice at some point.
Let us know if/what other solutions you find,
-jl-
I have not tried Phone.com. I would love to hear from someone who has and can tell me more about how it compares to Grasshopper.
-jl-
I use phone.com for my day to fay calls and really like it. We actually also use grasshopper for our main phone on this site. Grasshopper is good because it forwards to any phone line or provider. Phone.com requires the numbers to be owner by phone.com. There prices are also higher but they do have a full mobile call in/out feature you could have a manager use on a cell phone. Overall I would recommend grasshopper for forwarding and phone.com as an actual phone provider. Just my 2 cents.
Thanks,
Brandon Reynolds
President
MobileHomeUniversity
(855) 879-2738