Attracting Tenants: Effective Marketing for Multi-Family Properties
If you're in the multi-family property industry, you already know how competitive it is. Therefore, whether you recently finished building a new development or currently managing an existing property, it's crucial to create an effective marketing strategy to help you grow your business and achieve your marketing goals.
An effective multi-family strategy entails identifying your target market, choosing appropriate marketing channels, and measuring your campaign's effectiveness. With the right multi-family housing strategy, real estate agents can boost occupancy rates, generate more leads, and increase their business visibility.
This multi-family home marketing guide offers actionable tips for developing an effective strategy for your real estate business. From using real estate search engine optimization (SEO) to utilizing email marketing, you'll understand better how to navigate the competitive multifamily home industry.
What Is a Multi-family Home?
If you've been asking, what does a multi-family home mean? A multi-family property is a residential home containing multiple housing units.
Multifamily properties offer new and seasoned investors many opportunities to grow their finances. Some multifamily investors live in one of the units and rent the rest to maximize cost, making it an excellent wealth-building tool.
For a building to qualify as a multi-unit home, it needs to contain many units in a single building or one building complex, for instance, an apartment building.
While multifamily homes are expensive to buy, they're easier to finance compared to a single-family home. Because multifamily investing helps generate a more positive, consistent cash flow, financial institutions are likely to approve a multifamily loan. However, your down payment will be bigger than the person financing a single-family home.
Additionally, the property owner can spread vacancy risks across multiple units rather than one. Multifamily investment helps real estate investors build their portfolios quickly.
For instance, a real estate investor can acquire an apartment complex with ten units to their investment portfolio instead of buying ten single properties over time.
The following are major types of multi-family homes:
1. Apartment Buildings and Condominiums
As the most common multifamily housing type, multifamily condos, and apartments have multiple units. The difference between condominiums and apartment units is ownership. While apartment owners rent out units, residents own condo units.
2. Duplexes and Townhouses
A townhouse is a multi-family real estate property similar to a single-family home. Townhouses usually have their own separate entrances, and each building contains more than one unit. Residents share a wall with other townhouses.
Alternatively, duplexes are one building with two separate housing units. Each unit has a separate entrance without residents sharing a common area.
Serving as a primary residence, a duplex is primarily found in residential neighborhoods.
3. Triplexes and Quadruplexes
Like duplexes, quadruplexes and triplexes are single-family housing options split into multiple units exclusive of each other. Triplexes comprise three multiple units in a building, while quadruplexes have up to four units.
You'll also find buildings with five or more units.
4. Mixed Use Buildings
This type of multifamily real estate serves multiple purposes and can be used for industrial, institutional, cultural, commercial, and residential purposes.
Found mostly in urban areas, a mixed-use property can feature residential units on the upper floors and commercial companies on the ground floor. Thus, mixed-use houses also qualify as commercial properties.
There! We've explored the multi-family homes definition and types of multi-family properties new investors must know.
Top Multi-family Housing Marketing Strategies for Realtors
The following are top marketing strategies for multi-unit properties:
Use Real Estate SEO
Since most people turn to search engines like Google and Bing to get information or make purchasing decisions, savvy real estate agents must engage in content marketing and SEO best practices to increase their site visibility organically.
Ranking higher on the real estate search result pages (SERPs) is crucial to generating more leads and growing your business. The real estate SEO goal is to make your website rank higher once internet users search for relevant keywords under your business specialization.
According to Search Engine Journal, websites on Google's first search engine result page receive 25% of all web visitors. Also, data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) shows that 44% of home buyers search for listings online first.
If you need help with real estate SEO, contact Ardor SEO to incorporate SEO best practices, such as technical and local real estate SEO, to increase your website visibility and generate more leads.
Utilize Email Marketing
Another effective method for real estate agents to gain conversions and engage with their target audience is email marketing. Besides being cost-effective, email marketing can get your business in front of multifamily investors.
Email campaigns create an avenue also to engage your tenants long after they've rented your multi-unit properties. You can update your tenants on the latest and future innovative offers, bonuses, giveaways, promotions, and offers.
Incorporate Online Reviews
Over 97% of online users depend on reviews before making purchasing decisions. Hence, testimonials and reviews are essential for successfully marketing multifamily units.
Utilize effective reviews to attract new tenants while retaining existing tenants. Ask your tenants for reviews. That way, you can use them to build your brand reputation while attracting new tenants. Positive reviews can convert leads from your marketing campaigns, materials, website, and ads.
Update Videos and Images
Ask the property management company handling your residential property to update high-quality videos and photos on your website regularly. Interested tenants will like to examine the units in the apartment complexes before considering touring the building.
Property managers should upload videos highlighting the multifamily building's unique features. Also, recent videos and photos of communal amenities (conference rooms, lobby, swimming pools, and gym) and common areas should be available on the site.
Leverage Social Media
Anyone interested in investing in or buying multi-family homes must leverage social media to succeed. Many tenants search on social media for their living space, whether a single-family house or an apartment unit.
While your multi-family real estate business doesn't need to open an account on all the social media platforms, it's best to be active on Instagram and Facebook, as most property buyers check these platforms before making purchasing decisions.
A creative and effective multifamily marketing strategy drives potential tenants to the realtor's website, increases traffic, generates leads, and converts the leads into paying customers. Reports show that 4.76 billion people currently use social media, so ensure you're offering your services to social media users.
Improve Your Multi-family Home's Web Page Usability
Your website page is an integral part of multifamily marketing. Therefore, it must be simple, attractive, user-friendly, and informative.
Since 92.3% of internet users browse through their smartphones, your multifamily website should be designed to be mobile-friendly. If you're considering getting a website for your multifamily business, it'd be best to outsource the web design to a leading digital marketing and website design company like Ardor SEO.
Remember to add call-to-action links to your web pages. All your marketing strategies should drive search traffic to your web page, increasing your visibility.
Why Invest in a Multi-family Home
Multi-family real estate investing is the best way to build wealth and generate cash flow. The following are reasons to invest in a multi-family home:
1. Easier to Finance
Although the single owner-occupied property is cheaper to finance than multi-family homes, they’re relatively easier to finance. Like rental properties, multifamily properties are less risky for lenders than single-family homes because it houses many families under the same roof.
If you want to earn potential rental income by investing in other rental properties besides multi-family complexes, note that your mortgage interest payments will depend on your loan amount and current interest rates.
Multifamily properties are also less risky because, unlike a single-family home, a vacant unit has a less negative impact on the investment since the owner still enjoys rent payments from other unit occupiers.
2. Grow Your Portfolio
You can easily grow your rental property portfolio with a multifamily investment property than with a single-family home. For instance, you can reduce the business expense, energy, and time used in buying 100 single-family houses by purchasing a multifamily property with 100 units.
Aggressive investors can grow their portfolio with a few multifamily investment purchases rather than buying individual properties.
3. Easier Property Management
Most single-family property investors with few properties try to self-manage the homes to save money, causing stress for both parties. Hence, hiring a property manager to help manage the investment is best.
Multi-family properties are easier to manage as they produce substantial income and cash flow, enabling the owner to afford a property management company.
Also, multifamily properties are inexpensive to manage because:
- Units are centrally located instead of being spread over a geographic area
- Professional managers work full-time. They sometimes live in the building
4. More Forced Appreciation Options
Forced appreciation entails an investment property increase in value due to actions undertaken by the owner. Multifamily properties offer more options for owner-driven appreciation considering small changes add value to multiple families living in the apartment complex.
Furthermore, larger multifamily properties feature community amenities, and large common areas owners can force appreciation and add value.
Common improvements owners can use to force appreciation on multifamily investment properties are:
- Adding security features like security guards and gates
- Improving existing amenities
- Updating individual units and the entire property
- Improving curb appeal
5. More Cash Flow
As we mentioned, multi-family properties offer an opportunity to generate cash flow compared to single-family properties. Unlike single-family homes spread across different locations, multi-family investors enjoy higher profits with lower expenses due to the many units in one building.
Generally, multifamily properties have consistent and centralized management teams dedicated to lowering expenses while generating profits. Simply put, multifamily properties generate cash flow by consistently forcing appreciation, resulting in a stronger balance sheet, higher gains, and higher rents.
FAQs
You can employ many strategies to market multi-family properties, like Google Ads, open house events, social media platforms, referral programs, and SEO strategies.
You can measure your marketing campaign's effectiveness by tracking metrics like occupancy rates, conversion rates, lead generation, and website traffic. Analyzing these metrics helps identify marketing campaigns that work, allowing you to make data-driven decisions for optimizing your campaigns.
Top multi-family marketing channels include local events, content marketing, email marketing, social media advertising, and online listings. Every channel has its weaknesses and strengths. Therefore, selecting the marketing channels that align with your target audience and marketing goals is crucial.
As a savvy real estate investor, updating your marketing strategy to reflect market changes, consumer behavior, and industry trends is best. Consider revising and reviewing your marketing plan yearly, making adjustments where necessary based on current data and new insights.
Conclusion
Creating a multiple-family home marketing strategy is essential to the business's success. By creating compelling messaging, utilizing real estate SEO, improving your web page usability, updating videos and images, and utilizing email marketing, you can attract prospects, stay ahead of the competition, and increase occupancy rates.
Creating an effective marketing plan isn't a one-time event. You can generate more leads and grow your business by staying updated with the latest marketing tactics and strategies.
Hopefully, this guide gave you practical tips and valuable insights to help create winning marketing strategies for your multi-family business. Following the tips, you can create a multi-family real estate marketing plan that increases your brand awareness and resonates with multi-family investors while driving more business revenue.
If you're venturing into the multifamily industry, you need to stay updated with multi-family trends. Listen to experienced investors and successful multifamily agents share their success tips on the Icons of Real Estate podcast to help novice real estate investors navigate the world of multifamily real estate investing.