Advertisers spend millions of dollars to persuade you to buy their brand of toothpaste, breakfast cereal, automobile or deodorant soap. Why do people buy one brand as opposed to another? That is the question the marketing gurus ponder every day. The answer is: that particular brand is appears to fit someone’s needs the best, is the one their mothers bought, is the cheapest, or comes in the prettiest package.
Without spending a few million dollars to hire one of these gurus to tell you why your tenants choose you, do you have a clue or two yourself? Why do they choose Landlord X’s brand of rental over Landlord Y’s?
You want them to rent from you for the right reasons. There are lots of reasons that tenants choose a brand, in this case your property, and not all of them to the landlord’s benefit. You want to eliminate the bad reasons and make sure there is a whole slew of good ones.
What are the bad ones? Looks like a good place to commit crimes. Seems as if the landlord is a sucker for a good story, not too particular and will leave us alone to be bad little boys and girls. A whole bunch of my sleazeball friends already live in the complex.
If they rent from you for one of those reasons, you are in a heap of trouble, boy. Those “benefits” do not bode well for the landlord. Would you run an ad that says, “we’re easy to rent from, don’t check out who rents from us, and the parties here are a blast—and really noisy”? Yet, too often the landlord and the property itself sends out just that message.
Part of effectively marketing a property to rent, of giving your brand an identity that says “good tenants live here,” is sending out all the right messages and also sending the message that bad tenants need not apply.
Well how do you do that? It all starts with how you present your property. Having the property crisp and sharp is a start. A well-kept property shouts “a good landlord owns this place.” Good tenants like to rent from good landlords (bad tenants hate good landlords).
Something else are ads that say somewhere in them, “so our properties remain great places to live, we check references carefully.” That tells good tenants that their neighbors will also be good tenants. It tells bad tenants “don’t even bother to call.”
The finishing touch for a good tenant that your property is the one they would want to live in is that you have your paperwork organized. Along with your rental application, you have printed rental policies and standards, and maybe even some references from past and present tenants. Think that won’t impress a good tenant?
Sell your brand of rental property right and your tenants will tell their friends, “my landlord really has it together, he’s just about the best one I’ve ever rented from.” And you’ll be saying, “my tenants are just about the best ones around, here’s hoping they stay a long time.”