Are you looking to update your apartment community websites?
Choosing which multifamily website vendor to help is a serious (and daunting) endeavor.
After all, your website is the single most influential marketing tool for your community.
Here's what to look for as you go through the selection process:
The first (and obvious) area most apartment marketers will look at is website design. Design is essential—a website should show a community in its best light to appeal to prospective residents.
That said, it's easy to get too carried away with design and focus less on performance when perusing different website vendors. Apartment websites need to be appealing, but their primary function is to convert visitors to leads for the leasing office.
That's why apartment marketers must avoid boutique-style website vendors who don't specialize in multifamily.
There's also a technical facet to the conversation that apartment marketers must pay attention to when researching website vendors.
An apartment website should load quickly, meaning media content must be sized appropriately throughout the site. The site navigation should also be straightforward. Apartment websites that achieve these things make browsing the website easy for prospective residents and are also better optimized for search engine visibility.
Look for a vendor who emphasizes floorplan-specific apartment websites. The reason is twofold:
The best method for meeting both expectations is having an apartment community website with floorplan-specific pages and media content. Evaluate vendor websites and see if they have emphasized both features, which are more effective and give prospective residents the apartment website experience they want.
In addition to wanting to be able to identify and see inside different floorplans on an apartment's website, renters also want real-time rent prices and availability status.
Choosing a multifamily-specific website vendor that integrates with your property management software is essential. Otherwise, it'll be very difficult to keep pricing and unit availability up-to-date—which will negatively impact your website's ability to convert.
Roughly 80% of our clients' website traffic is mobile. That means a mobile-responsive website isn't just a nice-have; it's essential in today's leasing environment.
A website vendor must place a high priority on the performance and design of the mobile version of their websites. Not only is that to ensure a positive browsing experience, but also to keep rankings high in Google.
Some vendors—like a property management software company that includes a 'free' apartment website—produce brilliant, beautiful, highly-performing desktop websites. But do their mobile sites match those traits? Take a close look at that when choosing a vendor.
A vendor with strong SEO capabilities ensures your community ranks well in Google—and is prepared for the next era of AI-powered search experiences like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.
From messaging, structure, to even technical back-end setup that ensures fast load times, working with an apartment website vendor who both understands SEO and designs their websites with best practices built-in is a huge advantage—and gets you in front of renters wherever they're searching.
Recognizing a need for a website, searching for a vendor, and selecting one, can be a long process. (It's why redesigning or creating a new community website isn't necessarily the best play for stopping a current vacancy crisis.) The set-up steps beyond that can be just as long.
Clarify with a potential website vendor how long their onboarding process typically takes to launch the new website. There will be a lot of information to gather, so a website vendor must have a clearly defined outline for every step ahead of the launch.
Find an apartment website vendor who handles design request fast. Leasing is 24/7/365—and any outdated information on your website costs you.
It's worth the due diligence of confirming how they handle design requests.
Do this now so you're not caught with a website vendor who finishes the new site and is never heard from again. It's an unfortunately common scenario.
Vendors need to be willing to prove the success of their apartment websites with verifiable data and reporting.
Page visits, organic traffic counts, time on site...it's all vital information that helps apartment operators and marketers make intelligent adjustments to their websites and advertising campaigns to improve leasing capabilities.
With verifiable data, these individuals can stake the claim that their apartment's website is the lease-generating machine they need it to be.
Website accessibility is a critical feature and ought to be something the vendor also endorses.
In the new age of the Internet, programmers must design websites so all users, regardless of any temporary, situational, or permanent disabilities, can access them. Otherwise, a company's inaccessible website may make them susceptible to litigation. The relevance is clear to the multifamily industry—as apartment properties must meet ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) specifications, so should community websites.
It would be best if the website vendor designs code that meets Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Avoid vendors who rely solely on accessibility widgets, as those don't meet WCAG standards. Many disabled users have said that they make browsing websites unnecessarily more complex.
Because websites have a foundational role in compelling prospective residents to sign a lease, choosing a website vendor that works exclusively for the multifamily industry is pivotal. They would have the best insights into what makes an apartment's website a community's top-performing marketing channel.
RentVision’s apartment websites meet every critical criterion we’ve outlined:
Floorplan-specific architecture
Mobile-first responsive design
PMS integration and real-time updates
Built-in accessibility and SEO
Automatically feature floorplans with the most upcoming vacancy
Walkthrough video tours for every floorplan
Watch the video below to see how it works, or schedule a demo to learn more.