It's Thursday morning, you've got a fresh cup of coffee, and you're settling in to start your day. You check the news and scan your inbox before eventually logging in to your property management software.
And then your heart sinks…
Three more notices just came through overnight and, suddenly, you're in the midst of a vacancy crisis and you had no idea it was coming.
If you want to avoid sudden increases in vacancy like this, you need to have the ability to identify and prevent vacancy before it even becomes a problem.
One solution is to change your community's marketing plan so that it's centered around your various floorplans. Why does this work?
Here are three steps you can take to center your apartment's marketing plan around your floorplans:
More often than not, we see apartment marketers clump their floorplans all together on one website page that's labeled…well, floorplans. But when a person visits the floorplans page, they're not able to click and go to a page for the floorplan they're most interested in.
There are multiple problems with that approach:
One common indicator of potential vacancy is a dip in website traffic. This is why dedicating a page to each individual floorplan is a key first step. It better serves prospective residents in their search, and gives you the clearest means to collect web traffic data for each floorplan—a crucial element in identifying the start of a vacancy crisis.
When you're able to see a change in traffic patterns to your website, you're getting in front of a vacancy problem well in advance. You are able to proactively make educated decisions to solve the problems affecting that floorplan and prevent it from escalating further (and shocking what was otherwise a pleasant Thursday morning).
If you utilize Google Ads, it's likely that you have campaigns focused on the name and location of your community. That is a great start.
Take your ads a step further by building campaigns around each of your floorplans, too. These ads strategically work to accumulate qualified web traffic directed towards your floorplan-specific pages instead of the homepage of your community's website.
When a certain floorplan is struggling because it's not getting the right amount of web traffic, or a few notices come in around the same time, you can easily increase the amount you're spending on a daily basis for that floorplan's campaign until the issue is resolved.
Inversely, if you've got a floorplan that is full, you could actually put that campaign on pause and save money because you don't need additional traffic directed to that page.
Combining the power of floorplan-specific pages with digital ads truly gives you the means to combat vacancy strategically. With that one-two punch, you can take actionable steps towards stopping vacancy at the floorplan level, giving you a better chance to sustain higher occupancy rates year round—a worthwhile pursuit for every apartment marketer!
If you're going to run a rent special to avoid a vacancy crisis, remember this rule: Run specials more often on fewer units.
Think of your apartment community as multiple different communities—in this case, many different floorplans with various bedroom and bathroom counts—so that you're only running specials on a floorplan-by-floorplan basis.
Trigger a special only after you've recognized that there is a vacancy problem occurring within one of your floorplans. Make that clear as you market it, too.
This is part of our strategy for implementing smarter rent specials that work towards maximizing your apartment's revenue.
Video: A Smarter Approach To Implementing Rent Specials
When your marketing is centered around your floorplans, you can implement specials designed to drive leases toward the floorplan with the greatest need. In that instance, you can edit that floorplan's Google Ads campaign to include information about the special, and then make those same adjustments to that floorplan's dedicated website page.
The goal here is to avoid running a community-wide special that causes you to lose money, and to make it clear with your marketing about which floorplans are being discounted.
The best way to prevent vacancy issues from spiraling into a full on crisis is to center your apartment's marketing plan around your individual floorplans.
Floorplans are a key feature of RentVision's Community Website solution. Our websites are built with floorplan-specific pages that feature walkthrough video tours and photos. Our predictive algorithms forecast future vacancy issues and make adjustments to ad spend automatically. That automation also includes rearranging the order of your featured floorplans on your apartment community's website so that that floorplan needing the most help gets more visibility and traffic to it. To learn more, schedule a demo today!