Methods of Lead Generation for Apartment Locators
Hello everyone, this is David, an Sales Supervisor from the company Realty Pros. We specialize in helping our clients find high quality apartments in the DFW area. Here I want to go over some methods of lead generation that we use that you may be able to apply in your own apartment locating or real estate companies. I hope that you find it helpful.
General Tips
We mostly target the Frisco area due to the rapid expansion of the area and high quality listings available. There are many properties with 100% commission for locators while having great incentives for clients such as $500 off the 1st month’s rent or 1 month free. We try to advertise within the $900–1,100 price range. Most properties below $900 will pay 50% and we find that the clients will often not like the qualities of the property, making $900 and above a better price point to show quality options at 100% commission. Part $1,100 we find that commissions can go higher than 100%, but the market is much smaller. We may figure out an advertising strategy for the higher end properties later, but we tend to use referrals for those and keep our ads targeted at around the $900–1,100 area.
1. Facebook Ads
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We currently generate the majority of our leads using Facebook boosted posts. We started spending about $30 a day and now we are spending $200 a day. We use automatic placements and adjust the map ranges for each post depending on the property.
Make sure to respond quickly to incoming leads to maintain a response time below 15 minutes, this will show your page as Very Responsive to customers. When running an ad on a boosted post, you will also be able to invite people to your page that have liked it. Make sure to invite all of the likes to your page so that your unboosted posts will also get more organic traffic in the future.
2. Facebook Marketplace
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This is a free alternative to running Facebook Ads on your page. Facebook now has a free marketplace that you can use to sell things. This includes real estate for rent. We usually post the same properties here that we have boosted on our page, and we can use it to explore what generates interest without spending additional money. The inquiries from this tool are far better than Craigslist, so we recommend that you look into this option if you have used Craigslist for your marketing in the past. There is an option to boost postings here but we have not tried it yet. We recommend that you post as many listings as you can here.
3. Newspaper Ads
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We have run two ads before in the UTD Mercury, in this issue they cost about $110 for 5.5" x 5". We had gotten one lead from this that generated $820 in revenue. We may be looking to go into this again with a larger ads or try it for a longer duration to see the results over time. We also plan to look at other university newspapers and also city newspapers as well.
4. Sports Sponsorship
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We have recently sponsored a Semi Pro basketball team, the North Texas Prowlers. They actually reached out to us first and we decided to go into it. Our name will be on their practice jerseys and duffle bags, and they have already begun to promote our postings and invite people to help grow our page. We see this working out well as the team owner has maintained great communication with us and is looking to pass out informational material at upcoming games.
We are looking at doing additional sponsorships in the future and possibly finding an eSports team to sponsor, as Twitch is a great platform for advertising. Through sponsoring teams like these, you can get your brand name out into the arena.
5. Radio Ads
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We will soon begin appearing on 660 AM The Answer! This show includes popular figures like Sean Hannity and Dennis Prager. Our broker will appear on-air for an interview and then we will also have a 60 second ad that runs during commercials. We’re excited to use mass media for promotion and will be definitely looking into more radio and television ads.
Conclusion
I hoped that you gained some insights from the methods listed above and can use them to grow your own real estate business. Our mistakes were not getting into most of these forms of advertising early enough, so we recommend that you keep exploring ways to get your brand known, both paid and unpaid. Some of our upcoming plans include filming client testimonials and creating high quality drone videos to promote.
Also, be willing to spend money to advertise your brand. It will cost you a lot more to not grow than the cost the advertisements will be. Be great, and if you enjoyed our content, give us a follow below:
