It's Thursday morning, you've got a fresh cup of coffee, and you're settling in to start your day. You check the news and scan your inbox before eventually logging in to your property management software.
And then your heart sinks…
Three more notices just came through overnight and, suddenly, you're in the midst of a vacancy crisis and you had no idea it was coming.
If you want to avoid sudden increases in vacancy like this, you need to have the ability to identify and prevent vacancy before it even becomes a problem.
One solution is to change your community's marketing plan so that it's centered around your various floorplans. Why does this work?
Floorplan-specific marketing gives you better visibility
into a potential vacancy issue well before it becomes
a community wide problem.
Floorplan-specific marketing gives you greater control
in stopping vacancy at the source.
Here are three steps you can take to center your apartment's marketing plan around your floorplans:
Step 1: Add floorplan-specific pages to your community's website.
More often than not, we see apartment marketers clump their floorplans all together on one website page that's labeled…well, floorplans. But when a person visits the floorplans page, they're not able to click and go to a page for the floorplan they're most interested in.
There are multiple problems with that approach:
- It ignores the fact that every prospective resident already knows how many bedrooms or bathrooms they'll need prior to renting an apartment. When they come to your website, they want an easy way of finding and learning about the exact floorplan that matches those expectations.
- Prospective residents want to be able to see the inside of the units in a specific floorplan—as well as pricing, availability, and amenities—which usually isn't shown on a combined floorplans page.
- You have no clue how to calculate which floorplans are popular, and which ones aren't, because all of the web traffic is going to one place.
One common indicator of potential vacancy is a dip in website traffic. This is why dedicating a page to each individual floorplan is a key first step. It better serves prospective residents in their search, and gives you the clearest means to collect web traffic data for each floorplan—a crucial element in identifying the start of a vacancy crisis.
When you're able to see a change in traffic patterns to your website, you're getting in front of a vacancy problem well in advance. You are able to proactively make educated decisions to solve the problems affecting that floorplan and prevent it from escalating further (and shocking what was otherwise a pleasant Thursday morning).
Step 2: Build Google Ads campaigns for every floorplan.
If you utilize Google Ads, it's likely that you have campaigns focused on the name and location of your community. That is a great start.
Take your ads a step further by building campaigns around each of your floorplans, too. These ads strategically work to accumulate qualified web traffic directed towards your floorplan-specific pages instead of the homepage of your community's website.
When a certain floorplan is struggling because it's not getting the right amount of web traffic, or a few notices come in around the same time, you can easily increase the amount you're spending on a daily basis for that floorplan's campaign until the issue is resolved.
Inversely, if you've got a floorplan that is full, you could actually put that campaign on pause and save money because you don't need additional traffic directed to that page.
Combining the power of floorplan-specific pages with digital ads truly gives you the means to combat vacancy strategically. With that one-two punch, you can take actionable steps towards stopping vacancy at the floorplan level, giving you a better chance to sustain higher occupancy rates year round—a worthwhile pursuit for every apartment marketer!
Step 3: Market specials on a floorplan-by-floorplan basis.
If you're going to run a rent special to avoid a vacancy crisis, remember this rule: Run specials more often on fewer units.
Think of your apartment community as multiple different communities—in this case, many different floorplans with various bedroom and bathroom counts—so that you're only running specials on a floorplan-by-floorplan basis.
Trigger a special only after you've recognized that there is a vacancy problem occurring within one of your floorplans. Make that clear as you market it, too.
This is part of our strategy for implementing smarter rent specials that work towards maximizing your apartment's revenue.
Video: A Smarter Approach To Implementing Rent Specials
When your marketing is centered around your floorplans, you can implement specials designed to drive leases toward the floorplan with the greatest need. In that instance, you can edit that floorplan's Google Ads campaign to include information about the special, and then make those same adjustments to that floorplan's dedicated website page.
The goal here is to avoid running a community-wide special that causes you to lose money, and to make it clear with your marketing about which floorplans are being discounted.
Conclusion
The best way to prevent vacancy issues from spiraling into a full on crisis is to center your apartment's marketing plan around your individual floorplans.
- Floorplan-specific pages on your website help prospective residents with their search, as well as give you the ability to collect web traffic data for each of your floorplans. Being able to see web traffic for every single floorplan helps you identify any potential vacancy problems.
- When you combine those floorplan-specific pages with dedicated Google Ads campaigns, you can then adjust your daily ad spend depending upon the status of each of your floorplans. If vacancy is affecting one of your floorplans, you can immediately begin to drive more qualified web traffic to it and stop the problem weeks in advance.
- Lastly, apartment marketing that prioritizes your floorplans allows you to implement smarter rent specials. Rather than losing money on community-wide specials, you can run specials as needed by floorplan and cutoff vacancy at its source.
Floorplans are a key feature of RentVision's Community Website solution. Our websites are built with floorplan-specific pages that feature walkthrough video tours and photos. Our predictive algorithms forecast future vacancy issues and make adjustments to ad spend automatically. That automation also includes rearranging the order of your featured floorplans on your apartment community's website so that that floorplan needing the most help gets more visibility and traffic to it. To learn more, schedule a demo today!