Share your best marketing techniques here!

Hi everyone,

I would like to ask the pros about their favorite and most successful marketing techniques to rent/sell homes. Any particular tricks to listings and refreshing on craigslist? Signage out front? Cookies? Balloons? flyers? I need to drive more traffic in to rent up units.

How about tricks to selling/renting fixer uppers?

How about ideas for smaller homes (2br 1bth homes that are 14 x 50??)

It is summer now so I am bringing in more homes and trying to get them rented up!

thanks for any input.

We’ve found there are no ‘tricks’ that work. Tenants are looking for affordable housing. Offering free hot dogs, balloons, a clown for entertainment, etc. doesn’t work. Offering such tricks will only cost you money, and not result in your homes renting faster or to a higher quality of resident.

Advertising works. First and foremost, advertise in your local CraigsList. Second, advertise in your local PennySaver (or similar) paper. Third, advertise in your local ‘big City’ newspaper (not your local City’s paper). Fourth, have a good sign on the front of your property indicating you have homes available.

Offer safe, clean homes at reasonable rates. That’ll sell.

Best,

-jl-

Try a direct mail piece to all local apartments, showing the benefits of the mobile home versus their current apartment (no neighbors up against their walls and ceiling, their own yard, the ability to park next to their door, etc.) and price the home so that it is well under the local apartment rents. You will get a ton of calls and lookers – people who are quality customers who have already passed criminal/credit screening at an apartment complex and have proven the ability to pay rent monthly. This was Dave’s brainstorm in Kansas City, and it rented so many mobile homes that it permanently ended our glut at the time. Probably the most effective emergency measure ever (we’ve never had to do it again).

I have found that you can put Craigslist on overdrive when combined with an effective landing page. Even if you do not have any website development skills, the average person can sign up for a GoDaddy website that is running a special for a $1 a month websites. They have improved their websites so much over the past few years that you can do easy drag and drop and customize it as much as needed without being technically savvy. With the caveat, you may of course want to use a more robust platform if you plan on building an empire/flagship website.Next step: Is create an attractive landing page so that you can link directly to that page from your craigslist Ad.Testing this for a park in Texas resulted in… drum roll… 30 contact in one day - yes, one day ~ if only this park had more lots!! Proving this theory further is that several of the contacts were made from the website form which means that after they left the craigslist Ad and viewed the landing page on the website, they were highly stimulated to submit their contact information. 7 showings resulted from 2 days of advertising… That’s what you call demand exceeding surplus!Thanks everyone else for sharing your tips.If you want to look at my page as an example of a landing page that yields good conversion here it is: Oaklawn Park Home #23 for Rent | Mobile Home for Rent. Top items on a page that greatly increase conversion (the likeliness someone will turn into a lead) include (1) QUICK large contact information for those that have ADD and only look at your information for a few seconds (2) keeping it simple & clean without distractions (3) pretty pictures but don’t overdo it (4) different ways to contact in order to appeal to the two different personality types that will visit your information - Assertive & Passive. The assertive type has no problem picking up the phone and calling. The passive type actually prefers to submit their information via a website form which seems odd but that is just how some folks are wired.Happy Marketing!www.YourPark.com