Can you make it more social?
What if you took Craigslist and made it just a little more social? What if you extended your leasing team by four fold overnight? What if you took the current tired resident referral model and tossed in a tool to assist those who would actually assist us in producing leads and leases?
Get the community involved
I have thought for a very long bit of time and even experimented with the idea of partnering with the people who live in our apartment communities to churn out marketing on our behalf. Our experiments have not been backed by a ton of passion and or adopted with cheery fanfare by the people that we invited to play along and nonetheless I think there might be an opportunity. I intend to continue to experiment.
How do you make Craigslist a little more social?
The loose thought, in brief, is to organize four to six template Craigslist Apartment Marketing Packages. Photos, ad copy, headlines, pricing and the such would be included. A detailed white paper to include step-by-step instructions for posting and responding to would be residents. It would also include an introduction training provided by the Mills Marketing Team. The training would be supplemented by four to six ongoing training sessions over time.
WIIFM
What’s in it for me? Or, for them? The carrot – a monetary incentive for every lease we secured, aka – the resident referral fee.
What do you think?
Your -thinking Craigslist can be more social – multifamily maniac,
M
0 Responses
I’ve thought a bit before about how to engage our residents more and utilize their individual strengths in promoting ourselves. I think the greatest opportunity would be in them sharing their individual experiences whether that be through video, writing, or whatnot. The apartments are what they are. The best opportunity is to hook more people based on the community of residents I think. Ideally, we would love to have people move in that our current residents would enjoy living with.
Ryan
Thank you for taking the time to add to this –
Your thoughts are spot on and I agree with them. I do think there is a sect of the population that is purely driven by the all mighty dollar. For them, experiences [as it relates to those in and around the community] are for others to have and enjoy. Not that they are much different from you or me but they are driven by making money. I’m just thinking I can tap into that passion in a way to brings benefit to the property.
And, I’m not sure that this would work at every asset class out there. The Laurel would not come to mind in trying something like this.
We have been thinking a lot about this in the way of ratings and reviews right on the property pages. If we bake it in and make it easy to give and share feedback at every major and minor touchpoint then we set the stage for creating a community interest profile. I think the profile (read: community personality) is what attracts like kind, like minded people.
I think we are going to see some amazing things evolve over the next 12 to 18 months. And, I am jazzed to work with and for people like yourself who can see it for what it will be.
Hope your weekend rocks.
M
Not to be a negative Nelly Mike, but I hope craigslist dies off. I don’t view that site as being friendly to multifamily – unlike other social referral options. The competition is brutal and brokers make it worse. From removal of ads, to IP blocking and ghosting… craigslist is an outdated source for apartment hunters. Duplicate ads, cheesy headlines, and the insane “post 3 times a day” philosophy pushes apartment seekers back to Google.
If residents are going to market for you, it has to be the easiest 1-2-3 process possible. I think tools like RentMineOnline offer benefits that far outweigh trying to manage the process of resident referrals via craigslist. But that’s just my humble opinion. 🙂
I think Craigslist has a place in renting places not in complexes and through private rentors. I don’t see a place for it in apartment buildings. If people want that experience, there are other mediums for that. The “3 times” a day thing seems like it is just busy work.
Charity
As always – thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule.
I do agree that CL is a noisy and in the same respect, we still take a fair number of leads and leases from the platform. So I don’t desire for it to die – ever. I do hope that the pay for model comes along real soon as I think it would clean up the riff-raff.
The notion I describe in my post was born out of real and true life story. Back in 2003/4 a gentleman by the name of Sam Soofi lived in our downtown Portland high rise – Portland Center. He came to us – before we new the power of CL and proposed the idea that he would do CL posts for us in exchange for rent concessions. We agreed and he lived nearly rent free for a fairly long bit of time.
On that premise – I think there are starving artists out there that would thrive on the idea. That is not to be considerate of your point about managing the system. Sam was one person on one property exercising a fairly new (at least to us) media. I’m not sure about scaling over fifty plus properties. It’s interesting nonetheless.
Have a smashing weekend and come back often – I enjoy your feedback.
M