88% of internet users trust online reviews just as much as they trust personal recommendations, and this number shows just how important it is to prioritize your online reputation. If your online reputation hasn’t always been stellar, worry not, as there are several ways to effectively improve your reputation without needing a whole lot of time or resources. At OccupancySolutions.com, we want to outline a few of these effective ways to manage your online reputation and get to a place where your online leads are leading to new residents joining your community.
One of the most powerful tools you can use in closing on a residence in your community is the connection. When a prospective resident feels connected to you, they’re more likely to feel good about the decision they’re making and closing on a lease, but learning how to connect with various prospective residents can be tough. 5 ways to connect with prospective residents on the close are:
Your tour is your first impression, it’s your way to connect prospective residents to your community and what it has to offer. On this tour, you’ll get questions from prospective residents, and you’ll need to have your answers ready to establish yourself as part of a confident and knowledgeable management team. 5 common tour questions you need to have your answers ready for include:
With a well-built website and a good social media reputation, community management teams can expect to receive more internet leads. Without closing techniques, however, management teams can’t expect to relate to these internet leads in a way that leads to coveted leases and closings. At OccupancySolutions.com, we want to give you the tools you need to convert your online marketing into the closings you want for your community. 3 tips for closing on those internet leads are:
When trusting your most valuable assets and property to another person, there are some important questions you'll want to go over with them. This article will cover five things you'll want to ask when interviewing your property...
If you have a show residence that prospective community members can visit while on a tour, you want to make sure that residence is staged in just a way that maximizes its potential. This residence will provide the first impression to touring prospects, and give them a way to envision the residence of their own. Because you will want the best first impression, there are 5 big staging mistakes that community management should always avoid:
Managing your marketing budget can be a tricky thing. Naturally, you want your community to have maximum visibility, but you also don’t want to invest too much and cause your budget to barely even out. Luckily, today’s modern internet age has offered a shiny, new, and invaluable resource to community management teams looking to maximize their marketing for a minimal investment, and that tool is social media. Billions of people sign into their Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts each and every day, making these platforms the places where the public chooses to “hang out” while online. Using these platforms for marketing purposes is much like placing your ad front and center in the busiest square in town.
Renting your property is a big step, and you need to make sure you screen potential tenants to avoid a lot of mishaps. These tips will help you find your ideal tenant, and save money in unnecessary court fees.
1. Proof of Identity Is A...
High resident retention shows that your community management team is one that keeps residents happy and a priority, and some community management team traits can help to keep residents leasing over and over again. 5 traits that encourage resident retention are:
Long gone are the days of scouring in-person classified ads when someone is looking for a new place to call home. Potential residents aren’t picking up the local papers as often anymore, and instead, they’re taking to the internet as an all-knowing, all-seeing, and all reviewed resource to lead them into their new community. Online, they can find the new community of their dreams from the comfort of their own home and feel confident in their decision to visit by also researching reviews and first-hand experiences. What this means for today’s community management teams is this – it’s never been more important to be visible on the internet.
Community activities help to build that organic sense of true community that is so important to management and residents alike. Summertime is the perfect time to embrace the power of community activities, and 5 perfect activity ideas for this season include:
Even when visits and tours seem to go well, objections are like to come up between management and potential new residents. With the right tools in overcoming these objections, they can be viewed as speedbumps, rather than high hurdles, and they can be managed to leave both the community management team and the prospective resident happy in their resolution. We at OccupancySolutions.com want to outline a few of these common objections and how you can work them out to come to a pleasing solution for you both:
As summertime rolls around for your community, it’s time to start thinking about the activities you could plan to bring your community together. A strong sense of true community builds loyalty and spirit, and there is no better way to organically grow this feeling than with shared fun activities that all community members are invited to participate in. For the summer months, a community-wide cookout for residents and management alike is a great way to build this relationship, and 5 tips on hosting a summertime community cookout are:
For community management teams, social media is a marketing tool that one can no longer afford to live without. More and more, people are going to the internet first to search for new communities, and one of the first places they often go is on their social media platforms to scope out a new place that may be a good fit for them. For management teams, adapting to this new technology may seem daunting, but there are many pros they should consider before deciding that social media may not be for them. The pros of using social media to market for your community include:
Spring and summer are the two most popular times of year when folks are looking for a new community to join. In the fall, many are preparing for winter, and in the winter, many find that the weather makes a move more difficult, so they wait for spring and summer to have the easiest transition to a new space possible.
Imposters who claim to be disabled so they can have an "Assistance Animal"
600,000,000 users are currently active on Instagram worldwide, and this platform is becoming one of the fastest growing social media platforms out there today. For property management teams, this means that there is a resource out there that you can’t afford to pass up, but being overwhelmed by the idea of branching out into Instagram for your brand is understandable.
Your brand is your symbol, it’s what creates the entire feel and atmosphere that surrounds your community and what people think of when they think of you. For this reason, it’s undoubtedly important to put a lot of care into creating your community or property brand, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be an overwhelming task.
Resident retention helps management teams to save on their bottom line and create that genuine community feel, so it’s easy to see why it’s such a sizable goal for management teams of all types of communities.
Building a community spirit is incredibly important to resident retention, but how can a management team go about building that community spirit in a way that is organic, genuine, and unforced?
