By Linda Day Harrison, theBrokerList, Chicago, IL

When creating an Internet presence and building a new public website, the first thing you’ll want to do is identify a domain name as close as possible to your company or property name. Don’t bother searching in multiple locations for your potential site’s name — you’re too busy for that! Go straight to a search engine like namechecklist.com.

Create your website on a platform such as WordPress. Put in the time, effort, and money to design and plan the site. Consider paying a designer to create a logo and graphics. Add content to the site, such as (in no particular order):

1. About Us
2. Services Properties and/or Listings
3. Team
4. Executive Bios
5. Contact Us
6. Affiliations
7. Blog
8. Testimonials

After all this work is done — content is added, graphics are selected, colors are finalized, fonts, headlines, and widget boxes are chosen — you (and only you, as you spearheaded the project!) can send out an email to everyone in your contact list to say, “Look! We have a new website and blog!” Yippee!

But then, if you’re like most website owners, the site sits, and sits, and sits. From time to time you might add a blog article, or update listings. If you’re smart, you thought to add a live feed of listings from another database service provider that’s integrated into the site. When new employees come and go, maybe you’ll update the site when you get around to it.

Don’t fall into this trap! Your website should be a living, breathing, active representation of you and your company. Make time to promote on social media. Push out your blog articles to LinkedIn and to all of the LinkedIn groups you belong to (maximum of 50 per person!). Encourage your team to tell all of their contacts about your new website or blog. Ensure that the domain URL is on every single thing you publish or post. Place simple share buttons on your pages or blog posts via the admin tools. Anything less, and you’re virtually guaranteeing that no one will ever share anything about you, your firm, or your great content.

While you’re at it, let your employees have access to sites like Facebook, and encourage them to keep an up-to-date LinkedIn profile (the modern-day business card). Your people and properties will be found and links will be out there in Google, where they can be discovered or exploited by new clients. If your website is found, that means traffic! Traffic is numbers, and numbers mean increased chances that you’ll meet a new client, tenant, or even find a buyer.

And get a Twitter page. Twitter is neither complicated nor difficult to navigate. It will bring t-r-a-f-f-i-c to your firm, which is only a problem if you plan to remain under the radar. Remember, you want every client to see your name in the media or an online content stream.

By Linda Day Harrison, theBrokerList, Chicago, IL

As property owners and managers we need to change our thinking about marketing. For instance, do you have a B2B (business to business) marketing message or do you just focus on B2C (business to consumer) marketing? I would guess that many of you have B2C messages down pat, but fail to focus on B2B. The reason the real estate management industry does not look at itself as playing in the B2B world is due to a myriad of things, but the most pertinent being our training and how we’ve been taught to present ourselves to the marketplace.

For instance, a typical business report about the economy focuses on consumer spending, retail, housing starts, home buyers, and the stock market. There is no mention of the terms we are familiar with, such as number of units, total square feet, vacancy, occupancy, tenants, building improvements, and leases signed. There is no connection to our industry metrics and benchmarks. Our data and statistics are not tracked due to the nature of our business model. It is as if our industry is a forgotten piece of the economic pie.

For this reason, I think there is a disconnect in how we really fit into the picture. My intent is to turn the tables and give you some tips on how to improve your B2B marketing messages by giving you the confidence to realize that we are vital to our communities.

The B2B marketing message you create should have to do with the value delivered to your nearby communities. Our properties purchase supplies and products from local merchants, as well as provide jobs to service industries such as painting and plumbing. Our properties deliver massive opportunities that are necessary to complete the community. Do you know the economic impact that your property provides? Do you know where your residential customers work or where commercial customers live? These are vital insights that will help you to understand your customer base and can help you create a strong B2B marketing message when you are communicating with potential clients.

As a property manager, you are a business. Not only should you market your property to the end customer, but also to the businesses of that customer. For instance, build a relationship with the store manager of the local grocery store. Feel proud, confident, and shake hands with that B2B professional. Even offer to show them the property if they’d like. Sounds strange doesn’t it? Use this interaction to explain how you fit into the community, and what value your property provides. This relationship could also help make the difference when a property owner is trying to decide between your property management company and another because it shows that you are an active member of the community and that you understand the property needs to function as part of a whole. It demonstrates that you know who your perspective tenants are, and what their needs will be.

Property managers are part of the larger community and we must tailor our marketing message to the obvious B2C customers, as well as the less obvious B2B beneficiaries.  Make a list of all of those businesses that benefit from your property. Develop a plan to attend local meetings or just visit the locations to leave a business card. If possible, offer incentives or setup cross promotions with the other businesses in order to reach out to your community. Open up a line of communication with that business. Get creative, have fun, grow your customer base, and network with other business leaders. It is vital that you create your own B2B marketing message in order to show that you are a key element of the community!

By Geoff Roberts, Buildium, Boston, MA

As many of you know, Buildium has been publishing a property management industry blog since 2008. That said, it wasn’t until earlier this year that we gave the blog a face lift, a new name and domain, and hired a staff of contributing writers from across the US and beyond (Hi Jo-Anne!). In doing so we’ve seen a significant increase in our readership, and we hope that you’ve found our All Things Property Management blog to be a valuable resource for your property management business.

I’m very excited to announce that All Things Property Management is now also a contributor to Zillow Blog. Zillow, which publishes hundreds of thousands of rental listings across the country, will be publishing selected articles from the All Things Property Management blog. Some articles will then be syndicated to other sites, including Fox News, Yahoo, US News and World Report, The Street, and a variety of other sites. While All Things Property Management speaks directly to an audience of professional property managers and others interested in learning more about managing real estate, Zillow Blog is focused more on an audience of renters. With this in mind you’ll see that our articles have been rewritten to address renters – by educating property managers and residents alike, we’re moving the industry towards manager-resident bliss – one blog post at a time.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Salvatore Friscia, Ben Holubecki, Peter Lamandre, Colin McCarthy, and Jo-Anne Oliveri for all of their hard work and contributions to the All Things Property Management community. Salvatore Friscia recently had his article Renters: How to Get Your Security Deposit Back published on Zillow Blog and Ben Holubecki’s article 10 Tips in Communicating With Your Landlord was published on Zillow Blog and US News and World Report.

We’re excited to keep growing All Things Property Management and are striving to become the best property management industry blog on the web. Keep on tuning in!

By Geoff Roberts, Buildium, Boston, MA

Whenever I’m asked what I do for a living, my go-to response is that “I work in marketing and public relations for a software company.” That’s a sufficient reply for most social situations, but on occasion I’m asked more specifically about my job responsibilities. Inevitably I’m stopped as soon as I mention “search engine optimization” or “SEO.” While this is a small part of what I do, I’ve found that it fascinates people – they tend to look at it as something of an enigma. “I’ve never understood search engine results” or “Google makes it all up anyways” are common responses, but the probing questions regarding SEO never stop there. Regardless of the industry you are in, search engine results are likely playing an increasingly important role in your company’s ability to be found by prospective customers and others interested in the products/services your business offers. As I’ve been receiving an increasing number of emails regarding SEO from Buildium customers, I figured I’d start by laying out some of the basic tried and true practices that can help your company rank more highly in search results.

What exactly is SEO?

According to Wikipedia, search engine optimization is the “process of improving the visibility of a website or web page in search engines via the ‘natural’ or unpaid search results.” In plain English, when you go to Google and run a search for anything, say “Boston Property Management,” it’s the process of improving how close to the top of the search results your company appears.

Where do I start?

Now that we’ve cleared up exactly what we are talking about, I’m going to lay out a 3-step guide as to where you should start. SEO is a hugely complex subject, but these basic concepts should get you started off on the right foot.

Step 1 – Identify relevant keywords

Before you do anything else, you must identify the “keywords” that people are searching for in order to find businesses like your own. A good way to do this is to think about what you would search for if you were looking for your business. Say that you run Joe’s Property Management, a company located in Boston, MA. The keyword “property management” is likely too broad of a keyword, although it applies to your business. “Joe’s Property Management” would likely be a better keyword, although it would only be effective to the extent that people had already heard about your company and were familiar with “Joe’s.” A better option might be “Boston Property Management.” By bringing location into the keyword you’re letting potential tenants and property owners know that you offer property management services specific to the Boston area. If everybody that was looking for property management services in Boston came across your company first in the search results, that could be valuable for your business, no? Likewise if you manage only residential properties adding the qualifier “residential” to “property management” might be a good way to drive relevant traffic to your site.

If you are new to SEO I’d focus on identifying one or two highly relevant keywords to start. You can then use Google’s Keyword Tool to search for how often each of these keywords is searched for on a monthly basis and how much “competition” there is around a particular keyword. Keywords with low competition are easier to rank highly for, and the more monthly searches a keyword has the more opportunities your business has to be discovered.

Step 2 – Set Your Title Tags

On-page SEO refers to making technical changes to the back-end of your website that make it easier for Google or any other search engine to identify what your site is all about. There are many different on-page aspects that you can change, but in my experience changing the “title tags” has the greatest impact on search results. A title tag is the text that appears in the tab at the top of your Internet browser whenever you open a website. Above you’ll see the title tag for amazon.com – “Amazon.com: Online Shopping for…” As a general rule, the closer to the beginning of the title tag you put your keywords the better. You’ll notice that immediately following the words “Amazon.com” are the words “Online Shopping” – keywords very important to Amazon. If you don’t have a technical skill set, you’ll need your web master or whoever manages your website to change the title tags for you. But adding keywords relevant to your business into your title tags will help you rank more highly for those terms.

Step 3 – Link Building

I think it’s fair to say that link building is the lifeblood of SEO – nothing will have a more dramatic impact on how highly you are able to rank for the keywords you have targeted. Search engines look at how many inbound links are directed at your website – an inbound link is a link on another website that directs visitors to your website. By putting your keywords in the “anchor text” of the links back to your site, you help yourself rank higher for those keywords. For example, if you want to rank highly for the keyword “Boston Property Management” having links on other sites that look like this: Boston Property Management; will help you rank more highly for that keyword. To start link building, reach out to current clients, associations, or anyone else that is interested in your business and has a website to see if they’d like to swap links with you. You offer to link to their site and vice versa – it’s a mutually beneficial process. That said, link building is time consuming and often frustrating. You should accept this and link building should become an ongoing part of your SEO strategy. One final note – link building is very much a quality over quantity activity. Links from highly “authoritative” websites – sites that have a high volume of visitors and are considered by search engines to be credible sites – are much more valuable and will help you rank highly in search results more quickly. For example, a inbound link from Amazon.com would be much more beneficial than 10 links from small online shopping sites. It will also be much harder to convince Amazon.com to link to your site, but that’s the nature of the beast. Website “authority” is often measured using Google’s PageRank.

Hopefully SEO is beginning to look a little less scary and you have an idea of how your property management company should begin to rank more highly for keywords vital to your business. If you want to jump into the deep end and take SEO into your own hands rather than hiring somebody to handle it for you, there a number of SEO tools available to you. A useful paid tool is SEOmoz, and a great free option is Google’s Webmaster tools.

By Ben Holubecki, STML Realty Group, Glen Ellyn, IL

As the weather warms up and the rental leasing season gets into full swing it is easy to get caught up in the rush of showing requests, rental applications, lease signings, and new tenant walk through appointments that usually fill these months for leasing agents and management companies. From what we are seeing in our area and what I have heard from managers and agents in other markets this is one of the more active springs in recent history for tenant moves and new leasing activity. We have seen our average vacancy time decrease from 30 days to less than 20 days over the last few months and some properties are renting as soon as they hit the open market. This is a far cry from just a few months ago when we were in the middle of one of the least active leasing winters that we can remember in the Midwest.

While this is all great news for those of us who earn a living filling and managing these vacant units, we have noticed one area where things have not picked up all that much. The “tough to rent” properties are still hard to move. The nice unit in the dirty building, the overpriced 1 BR apartment, the house with the crazy wallpaper, the home next to the hoarding neighbor, and other general nightmare rentals still continue to be issues. While the market seems to be increasingly active, I see the activity picking up for well maintained, clean, and competitively priced units. Unless the property is in a top-notch area, the properties with problems continue to be a tough sell but through some aggressive marketing and incentive offers we have seen even those properties move in a reasonable period of time. It takes a bit of creativity to get someone to look past things that they believe they can’t live with but sometimes it’s just a little bit of money or the structure of a deal that keeps things from coming together. Some of the more common and effective offers we see in our market lately have been:

- The waived pro-rated rent approach. While many property owners are opposed to waiving pro-rated rent for a mid-month move-in, we think it’s a great marketing tool. We try to explain to owners that the only true alternative is a vacant property and there is no upside in leaving the home vacant for 1-2 weeks while we wait for a tenant to move-in. By having the option to offer this as a bonus (free rent) to a potential applicant we have an advantage over other agents who do not have this option.

- The early move-in. Many moving tenants view the move as a stressful time where they have 1 weekend at best to finish packing, load a truck, move their items, and unpack before getting back to work on Monday. We have closed a ton of leases by just offering an extra week or two to begin moving items into the property. The tenants generally do not “live” in the unit during this time but use the time to bring in carloads of items based upon their schedule. They also have time to set up cable/satellite, utilities, etc. Cutting down on a potential renter’s stress is of great value to them. If a home is vacant and parties are agreeable to an early move-in period it can often make the difference.

- Reduced security deposit instead of reduced rent. We have dealt with literally thousands of tenants and I can remember only small percentage of them where we did not refund at least half of the security deposit to the tenant. In most cases we are returning 80-100% of the deposit upon move out but still we insist upon 1 month rent or more as our deposit guideline. Most renters are worried about the up-front cost associated with moving. They are less concerned about the amount of deposit that will be refunded 1, 2, or 3 years later. Instead of taking half off of the first month’s rent, offer half off of the security deposit. It accomplishes the same goal for the tenant by reducing up-front costs while keeping the rental income for the property fully intact. We even see $0 security deposit offers when times are tight although that’s more risk than we are willing to take on.

- Avoid psychological pricing barriers and rental search tiers. These are different in every market but they exist everywhere. There are cities where tenants won’t pay more than $X amount for a particular property type or location. You may be in a market where $1,000 for 2 bedroom apartment is the breaking point. No matter what you do you can’t rent units for more than $1,000 regardless of how nice they are. We have to be aware of these barriers and market accordingly. People in that market are not running online searches for properties $1,000-$1,499. They are searching $500-$999 generally and your property may not even be viewed by people searching in those ranges. The $995 or even $999 rental price is not only a psychological pricing issue for people who want to stay under $1,000 but due to the way that many rental website searches display listings you may be missing out on a huge number of potential tenants by overpricing units by as much as $1.

- Teaser or promotional rent rates. We only use these in times of high vacancy in larger multi-unit properties but this obviously works. By offering a significantly discounted rental price for 3-6 months which then re-rates to standard rental rates you can quickly fill properties with high vacancy rates. Now, the property owner must be prepared for the decreased potential cash flow in the short-term but if vacancy is an issue it should be considered as an option. We recently had a 72 unit property with 12 vacancies that we were having a hard time filling. We marketed $750 units for 2 year leases at $500 per month for the first 6 months and $750 for the last 18 months of the lease. We rented all 12 units in 30 days and they are now fully occupied. We had so much interest during that time that we now have 10 people on a waiting list although the promotional pricing program has ended. The owner’s potential income for the property was decreased by $3,000/month for 6 months but the 100% occupancy and longer term leases were well worth that risk in the short-term.

- Providing multiple payment options. A more recent option is the ability to offer multiple payment options. Offering online payments, weekly payments, accepting credit cards, Paypal, and other methods of payment open up options for tenants who otherwise may have to wait to sign a lease and move. The fact that these options are now being integrated and even offered by management software companies makes it all that much easier for us to implement these programs.

There are dozens of other tactics out there and every market and agent should have options suited to their area and business practices. The important point is that a bit of flexibility and creative structuring of leasing deals can make a big difference in leasing success and decreasing vacancy rates overall.

By Peter Lamandre, Better By Design Real Estate, Scranton, PA

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” – Benjamin Franklin

We all work hard to build our reputations. I was speaking with a potential property management client yesterday, when I asked him if he had any questions about my firm. His reply was simple; “Yes, are you honest?” I chuckled and reminded him that he was a referral from one of our oldest clients. The fact of the matter is that people like to do business with those they know, like, and TRUST. In property management the TRUST part is a big piece — after all the owner of the property is basically saying here is my single biggest asset, you’re in charge; please make me lots of money.

In the old days you would go to a chamber of commerce meeting, or an apartment association meeting, or a similar in-person event (we still do these things). In today’s internet-driven world, clients often first find you online then send you an email or fill out an online prospect form. The consumer will then conduct research online to find out all they can about you and your firm. The hard part is knowing what is said about you online — have you ever given thought to how many websites are out there? Here are some quick stats from pingdom.com:

Websites

• 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010
• 21.4 million – The number of websites added in 2010

Social media

• 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse)
• 25 billion – The number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010
• 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010
• 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month
• 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States

It would be impossible to independently search all of these locations to see if someone has tweeted, posted, liked or criticized you or your firm. Luckily you don’t have to, as there are services on the web like ReputationDefender.com that you can hire to keep an eye on things. These types of services can not only monitor your reputation, but can actively assist in promoting a good reputation and suppressing negative content.

Now if you’re frugal and have a bit of time on your hands you can do it on the cheap by utilizing a free service from Google called Google Alerts. Google allows you to have their server run a search for specific terms and have the results automatically sent to your email for review. You can enter searches for your name, your firm’s name, common misspellings, and anything else that might be posted in reference to your reputation. This will enable you to quickly respond to any info posted about you. Many companies are actively monitoring their reputation; in fact in my last post I mentioned “Tap Inspect” and whether it was via a manual, automatic or paid service they became aware of my post and actually commented on it. This a great example of a company proactively monitoring what people are saying about them and responding.

But how do you respond?

If someone posts a nice comment… thank them, people like to be thanked and it will only encourage more positive comments. It also shows that you care about what your clients think.

Don’t retaliate against negative posts. You are better off taking a deep breath and thinking about the post, admitting fault if there was indeed validity to the post, and demonstrating how you will correct the issue.

Lastly, write a blog fostering comments from clients, or create a Facebook page asking clients to make positive comments on your service. The best way to make bad comments less relevant is to promote the good ones.

Offering renewal incentives to current tenants can help to ensure that your units remain occupied and vacancies are not killing your bottom line. Here are a few great resources to help you keep you vacancy rates low and determine whether offering a rental incentive is your best bet.

• In addition to offering renewal incentives, here are some other steps that can really help you keep your vacancy rates as low as possible.
• When trying to determine whether you should offer a rental incentive or how much it is that you should offer, consider the costs associated with marketing the property and repairing normal wear and tear in vacated units.
• Here is a great article from the New York Times on the subject of getting your tenants to stay put.
• Entrepreneur offers some great advice targeted at property management companies — offering incentives to property managers can also help with keeping vacancy levels low.

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Most landlords will agree that a vacant unit ranks right up there as one of their least favorite things. The bottom line is simple: A vacant unit is money down the drain. There are, of course, times of feast when rental units rarely remain vacant for even a few days in between one tenant and the next. But then there are the other, slimmer times, when people are saving their pennies and staying put. In this case, finding a new, quality tenant is much, much easier said then done — it can take weeks (in some cases maybe even months) to find the right tenant.

And, of course, even if you are able to find a tenant, flipping a unit costs money. As discussed in our previous post, even those units that are left in good condition require some degree of re-investment — not to mention the cost of advertising and marketing available units.

Which all seems to make it clear that, at least in the current economy, retaining good tenants is the best way to go. Not only will it save you the expense of turning the unit, but it will also prevent a potential lingering vacancy from sucking away at your bottom line.

Sometimes, though, no matter how good of a job you’ve done taking care of your tenants and making sure that your property and their unit is in tip-top condition, a tenant just feels it’s time to move on. If a good tenant is really ready to go, chances are you won’t be able to do much to sway him or her. But if the tenant is on the fence, you may just be able to win them over for another lease period with an incentive.

When it comes to nudging tenants into signing on for another lease period, the most common incentives provided are rent breaks. How much you offer is a personal decision that you will have to make at your own discretion. Even $100 off rent for the first month of their next lease period might do it. But, chances are, in the case of a tenant who is seriously contemplating making a change, $100 won’t be enough to sway them. $500 or half off a month’s rent — now you’re talking. This is an amount of money that will make a significant impact for most people. It will likely allow them to catch up on bills or enjoy some sort of extravagance they are not accustomed to on a regular basis. This amount may just be the sweet spot. It’s also likely that you’re not losing much as it takes at least $500 to perform the standard “turn over” tasks and advertising.

Those of you who have a really desirable tenant and a tricky local economy may even opt to offer a full month of free rent. Before making such offers, be aware that such an amount may actually be more than it would cost to turn the unit over and advertise it. However, also remember that, though you will lose a month of rental income on the unit, you have the assurance that rent payments will resume like clockwork the following month.

Rent incentives require a bit of strategy on the part of landlords. Before determining if an incentive should be offered and, if so, what amount, it’s important to consider both the desirability of the tenant in question and the general health of the local economy as it will pertain to your vacancy rates. Also remember to think long-term—don’t just consider how such an incentive will affect you on the month the lease begins anew but also how it will (presumably positively) affect you for the next lease period to come.

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So you get the idea — giving a property owner some pro bono work shows them what you can do and that you are committed to earning the job. Here are some great additional links to help you stir up more business.

• The National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) is a great resource for property owners looking to hire a property manager. Your company should be listed on their site.
• Use Indeed.com to find property management jobs in your area, then offer the property owner a free consultancy. It’ll go a long way in landing you the job.
• Property owners have likely made a large investment in their properties — they want to see that any property manager they hire is just as invested in doing a great job. Here are some questions you should be prepared to answer to satisfy property owners’ concerns.
• If your time invested pays off, you need to be able to keep those vacancy levels low. Here’s some great advice on marketing your properties.

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