Property investment income comes from rent and property sales so real estate investors frequently need to market vacancies along with homes for sale. An investor’s income depends on their ability to market their properties to the right people.
If you’re a property investor, you’re in a great market. Real estate investing has some unique perks that other investments don’t offer. For instance, once you get your real estate license, you can legally broker your own deals. When you act as your own agent to buy a property, you don’t need to pay someone else the required buyer’s commission.
However, there are some things you can’t easily do on your own—like marketing. While it might seem easy to do your own marketing, it’s actually a complex strategy that requires expertise and experience to get right.
It’s understandable if you don’t want to spend the money on professional marketing services. While you’re better off with an agency, there are ways to improve your ability to market without professional experience.
If you’re investing in property, try these tips to achieve your marketing goals.
Hire a professional marketing team
Are you considering marketing your own rental properties? Some investors do their own marketing, but it’s not ideal. Marketing is a specialized profession that requires dedicated time and experience to get targeted results. If you want to attract a long-term, reliable tenant, a professional marketing team will target your ideal tenants through specific words and phrases.
Professional marketers have several key advantages:
- They know all facets of the real estate market
- They know how to capture attention from ideal tenants
- They have access to professional photographers
- They have the tools and knowledge required to create print-ready ad files
While it’s possible to learn some marketing tips and tricks online, if you haven’t become proficient in marketing, you’re more than likely missing important fundamentals.
Not wanting to pay the fees for marketing is understandable. Another option is to hire a property management company. Many organizations provide marketing services alongside standard landlord services like rent collection and maintenance.
Learn from corporate ads
When you’re new to marketing and you don’t have time to learn how to create ads from scratch, you need a template to follow. The best resource for marketing templates is going to be ads published by large corporations marketing apartments, condos, and other properties.
Whether you’re selling or renting, find ads produced by large corporations with big marketing budgets and analyze their ads. You can find these types of ads in color marketing booklets at the grocery store and on classified ad websites.
The reason you want to use ads published by large corporations is that they usually hire professional marketers to create their advertisements. Just be sure not to copy their ads word-for-word or use any of their images. Use the style and format as a general outline, and pay attention to the words they use to describe their properties. You can use the same adjectives, just don’t use them in identical sentences.
Disqualify people in your ads
Aim to disqualify as many people as possible with your ads. That way, you won’t have to sort through a bunch of applications and you’ll deter unqualified applicants.
While you can’t publish ads that violate the federal Fair Housing Act, you can publish ads that present strict tenant qualifications upfront, so most unqualified people won’t apply.
Set your standards high for your tenants, and make sure to place those standards in your ads. For instance, state in your ads that all applicants must have a credit score of 650 and have no evictions on their record to be considered. People with evictions and a low credit score are less likely to apply and waste your time when they know they won’t even be considered.
Don’t use free rent marketing tactics
You’ve probably seen other investors advertise “free rent” specials. Most of the time, it’s not really free rent. However, sometimes it’s a legitimate deal where one month of rent is applied as a discount throughout one year.
Deals are great, but giving discounts on rent will only attract bargain hunters. These people might bail on a lease if they find a cheaper place to live, or they might try to negotiate late fees or talk their way out of their commitments.
Marketing is tough
The bottom line is that marketing isn’t easy and if you want to try it yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Just remember that if you don’t get the results you want, you can always hire a pro.
