Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/657319
APRIL 2016 9 THE JOURNAL / CMP COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE Vacant Homes? Try These Inexpensive Methods To Hit 100% Occupancy B y F r a n k R o l f e One of the givens from the affordable housing business today is tremen- dous demand. In many of our communities, we receive up to 100 calls per week from anxious customers looking for a nice, safe place to live that meets their budget. They are naturally drawn to the manufactured home community, as it offers no neighbors knocking on their doors or ceilings, their own yard, the ability to park by their front door, and the chance to own their own home. No apartment on earth offers these op- tions. So if you have a vacant home – assuming you are in a healthy mar- ket and priced appropriately – the fault is typically in your advertising and marketing plan. Here is our typical marketing attack plan, organized from free to those methods that cost money. Referral letters The best prospects that you have for any home in your community are the friends and family of your existing customers. These are people that already have a positive impression of the property, and already have a network of support. Our first step is to always send a letter to each and every existing resident, offering to give them a couple hundred dollars off their rent in exchange for the successful sign-up of someone they send your way. Highly effective at relatively no marketing cost. Signs in yards and windows You can buy these at Walmart or you can have them custom made at Fastsigns. The proper way to do this is to use two signs, not one, for each vacant home: 1) one sign in the yard to make you turn your head to look at the home and 2) a sign in the window of the home to reinforce that it's available and offer the phone number to call. You can buy these signs for around $10 per unit, and re-use them over and over. Big re- sults, little cost. Craigslist This is a completely free and extremely powerful marketing tool. Some community owners use this as their sole means of bringing in potential customers. High volume of customers, but often a good percentage of simply tire kickers. Keep the ads fresh and enlist the help of a teenager if you have no internet skills. Tear sheets These are 8 ½" x 11" sheets of paper with your phone number in ver- tical strips on the bottom. The potential customer simply rips the num- ber off the page and gives you a call. You probably used these in college to sell your refrigerator when you graduated. You place these in laundro- mats and grocery store bulletin boards. In certain markets, you can pin one up on Monday, and find all the numbers detached by Friday. And the cost is zero. Banners on frontage Now we're moving into the category of marketing plans that cost money. Not a huge amount. But a banner might cost $300. The good news is that you can use it over and over. You simply place the banner on your frontage and those 5,000+ cars that pass by daily start to call or walk in. These are great potential customers, as they already know pre- cisely where your property is, as well as what it looks like. In addition, they already live or work nearby. MHBay.com and MHVillage.com At a small charge, you can post your home on these websites and po- tentially reach a large audience. While these are never our primary at- tack, they produce a good flow of customers for the small price involved. Largest metro newspaper Even though this is the second most expensive form of marketing a vacant home, it has the highest draw of any method. Why is that? We think that all Americans break down and buy the $1.50 Sunday edition when they go to make a large purchase or move. You should run your ad- vertisement in the classifieds, with a simple three line ad. If you do every marketing method on this list, the largest metro newspaper will always outscore all of them. At a cost of around $200, however, you'll proba- bly skip this attack plan if you are pulling enough traffic from the free methods. Direct mail to apartments OK, this is the nuclear bomb of vacant home marketing. You send a postcard to every nearby apartment resident which says something like "why rent when you can own" and then hammer on the fact that you get a yard and privacy, coupled with attractive photos of the interior. If you do a 500 piece mailing, you'll often get 50 potential customers to call. And these are a very fertile group, as they already live nearby and are ready to upgrade. The only problem with this attack is that it's the most expensive, at around $500 for a 500 piece mailing. But the good news is that you rarely need to take advantage of this method. But if you have homes stacking up, then this is an effective way to blast your way through. We once pushed around ten va- cant homes out the door in a month in Kansas City with a direct mail blast. Expensive, but unbelievably effective. \ 10