“But I’m not selling anything.” As a rental property owner, you are. Just as if you were selling can of food in a store, a lawn mower at the hardware store, you are selling a prospective tenant on the notion of renting from you and on a place to live. There is absolutely no difference in the sales approach you take between selling a lawnmower and selling a prospective tenant on you and your property.
Prospective tenants are going to make a purchase, a big purchase. The purchase provides them a place to live, to raise their families, to call home. The money they spend on renting from you is usually a lot more than any other purchase they make until they buy a house. I know–some people’s car payments dwarf their rent.
So how does knowing that help us get our properties rented? We need to use the same techniques we would use selling anything.
People buy on emotion. Imagine two properties similar to each other, essentially equal in quality and features, but a prospective tenant picks one over the other. Why is that? There is some emotional trigger in the property, some look, feel, smell, or taste that makes him or her want to make that one particular property home. It could be something as simple as “it feels just like my grandma’s old house.”
Once your prospective tenant has made the emotional purchase, he or she backs it up with a rationalization. “I rented this place because it’s closer to work and schools.” That might be in spite of the fact that work and school are only 15 seconds closer.
She might say “I rented this place because the built-in microwave has a turntable.” That might be in spite of the fact that the other place they looked at, the one 15 seconds farther away from work and school, had a built-in spa.
People buy for their reasons, not ours. Wouldn’t it be nice if they did buy for our reasons? Then our marketing could reflect the reasons we would rent this particular property and prospective tenants would be lined up at the door to rent from us. But they don’t, they rent for their reasons. It’s too bad we don’t know what those reasons are in advance.
Regardless, those reasons are emotional, backed up with rationalization to support their emotional decision. Emotions come in two flavors, tasty and nasty. We want them to use tasty reasons for renting from us.
What are tasty flavors? Good schools; close to work; nice neighborhood; close to shopping; close to parents; convenient to the bus; the landlord is businesslike are some. Those all are reasons that reflect responsible people.
What are the nasty flavors? Easy to sell drugs; easy to fence stolen goods; landlord will let us move in without screening; the landlord doesn’t care how many people live here are some of those. Those are all reasons that reflect people whom we would rather lived somewhere besides anywhere near our properties.
Our sales approach appeals to another emotion, security, by letting prospective tenants know that we manage our rental property in a businesslike manner. We insist on good tenants. We insist on getting the rent on time. We insist on our tenants being good neighbors. Good tenants love and demand that. Bad tenants run in the opposite direction.
Our good tenants will buy from us because of an emotion that we welcome and will respect the fact that we run our business in a way that makes their homes wonderful places to live.