Renting your property can be an excellent way to earn passive income. However, you are not the only one who rents their property.
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This means that you are competing against property owners to attract ideal tenants.
Unfortunately, hanging a “For Rent” sign in front of your house is no longer enough these days. You need to maximize your presence to let renters know that your property exists.
This is where online marketing comes in.
In this post, we put together nine online marketing tactics you can do to promote your rental property:
Understand Your Target Market
One of the secrets to successfully promoting your rental property online is to understand your target market. If you’ve wanted to lease your property to a specific demographic, you need to ensure that your marketing efforts are aligned with their interests, lifestyle, and needs.
Let’s say you want to target families with young kids. Then, highlight family-friendly amenities in your property, like an expansive backyard and a treehouse. If you’re targeting seniors, you might want to mention key features like elevators.
Take High-Quality Photos
As the real estate industry moves into a more virtual environment, it’s essential to post quality photos and videos of your property.
Doing so does not require hiring a professional photographer. But you cannot post crappy images and videos, either. This won’t do your property justice.
Moreover, your property photos should provide an accurate representation of your property. Hence, you should showcase every room, including the kitchen, bathroom, living space, and private parking. Take a picture of them from a different point of view if you must.
Good lighting also plays a role in the quality of your photos. Therefore, if you have to take pictures on your own, make sure that your unit is well lit. You can also do a walkthrough of the entire property with a video or using a 3D camera. That way, tenants can virtually see what your property looks like.
Write a Great Copy
After taking quality photos, the next thing you need to do is come up with an excellent copy. You need to match those photos with highly accurate, engaging, and interesting captions.
Your copy is what ties your entire story together. Not only does this enhance your property’s online visibility, but it also makes sure that prospective tenants find your listing. Your copy usually breaks into two different sections- the headline and the summary description.
Similarly, your headline is also essential. For one, it’s the first thing that a user will see when they view a listing. Second, most tenants usually decide whether they want to keep reading or not based on your headline.
The summary section is also vital since it lets you finish telling the story as you tie your headline to your photos. This section helps a prospective renter visualize what your property is like.
Create a Video Listing
If you genuinely want to stand out and connect to more people, we recommend that you try creating a video listing. Usually, it includes all the usual elements of your standard listing. It also contains a short recorded video that lasts 5-10 minutes long.
This video allows people to get a better feel of your property’s floor plan, size, and flow from room to room.
Establish Social Media Presence
We live in a digital age. Therefore, establishing a robust social media presence for your rental property is crucial.
If you’re not on social media yet, you need to make accounts on highly visual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. That way, you can showcase how your rental property looks.
You can also share interesting articles that are related to home living and other relevant topics.
Make Use of Property Listing Syndication
What is property syndication? It is the most efficient advertising idea for your rental property.
It is defined as the distribution of your property listing on relevant sites. Its main goal is to increase exposure and decrease vacancy rates, making it an excellent digital marketing tool.
Use Paid Advertising
One of the secrets if you want to surpass your competitors is to use several listing sites the moment you decide to publish your listing.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do it manually since you can automate the process. You can also run Facebook ad campaigns to expand your online reach.
What’s great about running paid advertising is that you can target people using specific parameters.
Remember to select the Special Ad Category when creating your Facebook ad campaign for your rental property.
The ads in the special ad category have limited targeting options. It stemmed from advertisers abusing the ad targeting system to target specific groups of people or specific zip codes while using discriminatory ad tactics.
There are special ad audiences, though, these are similar to lookalike audiences on Facebook.
The special ad audience uses data from an existing source – your customers or leads, to form a new audience that has similar characteristics and behaviors to your source audience.
So having a list of previous renters can significantly increase the performance of your next ad campaign.
If your rental property is somewhere in southern California, you can incorporate relevant keywords in your ads. You can also target the kind of people who can see your ads based on their demographics.
Advertise on Rental Websites
Another way to promote your rental property online is to advertise on rental websites. If you’re in the US, you might have used sites like Zillow. If you’re in the UK, heart-is is a much better option.
Make sure that you list and advertise your property on these sites or wherever you think your potential renters spend time online. You might also want to make the most out of free online listings on high-traffic websites like Realtor.com, Redfin, or Craigslist. By doing so, you can expand your pool of prospects. You can also list your property on other authority renting industry sites such as Rentberry so when people search for rooms or apartments to rent then your listing will show up from where you’ll get potential renters.
If you’re searching for listing sites that are narrowed down, like for a specific city or state, doing a quick Google search does the trick.
Advertise on Podcast
This may sound counterintuitive but you can also advertise your properties on a podcast. Better yet, you can start a podcast about home living, where you can also promote your rental property. Good thing there are podcast tools for beginners that can help you get started with podcasting.
Offer Incentives
For long-term renters, you might consider offering incentives when they sign in with you.
For example, you can spread out your tenant’s security payment throughout the lease term. You can also offer free parking during the first year.
It is also helpful if you upsell certain services relevant to your rental property. This includes private parking, home cleaning services, or garden maintenance.
Implementing these online marketing tactics to promote your rental property can help you attract the right renters. Doing so could mean that you can generate passive income for at least 12 months.