We know the struggle: finding good tenants is hard. Keeping them can sometimes be an even tougher endeavor. In a day and age where people expect everything they interact with to work well with their technology, where does that leave property owners and managers? How do we keep ahead of the curve and satisfy our great, technology-driven renters?
Within just 10 keyword variations the total number of web searches for the word 'rent' is over 1 million.
It’s surprisingly simple, which is also why it completely baffles me how this + $200bn revenue market can be so slow to react to how the world is changing. I’ve seen really big property management companies have websites built in the age when it was still cool to own a computer built by IBM, so it’s no wonder that even though the average wage in the US is on an upward trend, a whopping 23 of the largest 100 cities in America experience Y/Y rent declines.
Did you stop for a second and ask yourself how many users search Google for a keyword related to renting each month? The keyword ‘apartment for rent’ lands over 590k searches every month. Within just 10 keyword variations the total number of web searches is over 1 million.
Crazy, right? - WRONG! What’s crazy is that your business doesn’t at least try to make sure that whoever lands on the website looking for rent is immediately hooked!
In terms of finding and gaining(retaining may be a better word here) new, quality tenants, we can:
- Design our website with their interests in mind - including large images, mobile-friendly site design, floor plans, amenity information, and last but not least let them know how to contact us and what to expect from our community. The more information we include here, the more likely our interested parties’ values will align with ours, and the better/longer-term they will be as a tenant in return.
- Install an email signup form on our site to enable interested parties sign up for information about our property, and get to know them better by screening any replies to our emails as well.
- Allow them to view our properties with a virtual tour, schedule a tour with us directly on the website, or chat with a representative of ours directly in their browser (and so much more!).
I’m sure you dreamed about how great it would be to have virtually zero vacancy time in your property across the span of a couple of years, but it doesn’t always work that way, right? What if the second a spot vacates you have over 3000 qualified leads to reach out to and say - Hey, still want to join our amazing community? Here at CodeCrew, we can take care of this for you. You just make sure that your bank account is ready to receive down payment for that property.
Now that we have great tenants, how can we use technology to keep them happy? Well, we can provide our tenants a way to log into their own account for our community, giving them the ability to:
- Pay rent seamlessly on their phone with any type of payment provider we care to use (PayPal, Venmo, credit cards, bank transfers, you name it!),
- Plan their commute, get the local weather forecast delivered to them via email each day, learn when their rent is due, receive payment receipts, late payment reminders, or just about anything else that will provide our tenants as well as the management deep value.
As one of the oldest professions in the world, it’s useful for us to also keep up-to-date with the latest trends in technology - it could be the difference between having long-term paying tenants which make little fuss or receiving the remainder of the tenants out there.
