If you ask apartment marketers what they’re most stressed about, the standard answer they’ll give you is website traffic. They’ll stretch their budgets to earn as much traffic as possible to their community websites—whether or not they have vacancies—because they assume it translates to leasing success.
The truth is apartment marketers should be more stressed about leases than traffic. If you need units leased, increasing spend on an Internet Listing Service or other marketing sources won’t magically solve your problem.
You need traffic plus web engagement to receive qualified leads ready to rent your apartments. Traffic is irrelevant if the content on your community websites doesn’t engage prospective residents.
There are three issues many apartment websites have that disengage users and, ultimately, impact leasing success. In this blog, we’ll cover those issues and how to avoid them so that your community websites engage prospects and produce leases.
Issue No. 1: Photo Gallery Pages
Initially, a photo gallery page on an apartment community website doesn’t sound like an issue; some may think it’s the most critical content featured. After all, a collection of beautiful photos and videos of your apartments surely helps create interest.
But photo galleries are problematic if they are the only page on an apartment website with visual content.
Randomly piecing together photos of a kitchen, living room, and other amenities creates confusion for prospective residents. If you’re a homeowner, you would never have bought your home without seeing the inside of it. How can someone confidently select an apartment when they can’t tell what floorplan they’re looking at on a cobbled-together photo gallery page?
How To Fix The Photo Gallery Problem
Reorganize your website so each floorplan has its own dedicated page for photos, video, and relevant content.
Here is an excellent example of an apartment website that utilizes floorplan-specific content instead of a photo gallery page. Here’s what to love about it:
- The ‘Floorplans’ page lists each floorplan in that community, along with individual video tours, bedroom count, size, rent price, availability, pet policy details, and more. Prospective residents can come to this page and immediately go to the floorplan that best fits their needs, and then click to visit that floorplan’s unique page for a comprehensive overview.
- At the top of this individual floorplan page is a photo scroller that features nine images of only that floorplan—much more effective and informative use of a gallery than just cobbling a bunch of random photos together on a single page.
- Below that photo slideshow is a video tour and links that direct visitors to contact a leasing agent or schedule an in-person showing of that floorplan.
- Scrolling further, visitors can see more details regarding that floorplan, including rent, availability, pet policy information, amenities, appliances, and utilities.
Issue No. 2: Poor Mobile Website Performance
The team at RentVision reports that around 60% of all web traffic to their client’s apartment websites is from a mobile device. However, when apartment marketers build their website or buy one from a vendor, they overemphasize how it looks on a desktop and mistakenly ignore the mobile presence.
If two-thirds of all your visitors are experiencing difficulties engaging with the mobile version of your apartment’s website, there will be a noticeable impact on your leasing ability.
How To Fix The Mobile Website Problem
First, prioritize mobile when building or buying an apartment website. If the mobile website loads fast and it’s easy to scroll through photos and videos, you can guarantee a majority of your website visitors will have a great experience.
Secondly, knowing that many prospective residents will use a phone during their apartment search, you can add features to the website that optimize the mobile experience. You could add a click-to-call feature that instantly dials your leasing office or a directions button that automatically opens Google Maps.
Issue No. 3: Price & Availability Damage Lead Generation
Two factors impact every prospective resident’s choice in an apartment community: price and availability. Can they afford the monthly rent, and when can they move in?
Yet many apartment websites show price and availability using poor practices that damage lead generation.
A noticeable instance of this is when rent gets shown as a broad price range resulting from revenue management software that includes pricing for various lease terms. When the price of the 2-bedroom floorplan gets listed as “$1,200-$2,400”, a prospective resident will have no idea what their rent will be or if they can afford it. Users will abandon your apartment’s website because they assume they’d have to pay closer to the higher amount.
How To Fix The Price And Availability Problem
You can solve the price problem by showing only the rent for a standard 12-month lease on your website. Prospective residents to better assess if your apartments are affordable to them if they only see one price featured.
The best solution for availability is to show which units are ready to rent on your website. Integrating your website with your property management software lets you see if this is possible. Prospective residents will expedite their leasing journeys if they know a unit in the floorplan they want is available. Pro tip: if you have a lot of available units, don’t show all of them as prospects won’t feel as obliged to act immediately.
Conclusion
These are three common issues with most apartment websites:
- Photo Gallery pages. You need floorplan-specific content instead.
- Poor mobile website performance. You can’t ignore that most prospective residents only see the mobile version of your apartment’s website.
- Price and availability damaging lead generation. Both are essential pieces of information you must feature correctly on your website.
Avoiding these issues will help your website generate leases and will also enable you to stop overspending on your marketing sources just to get extra traffic. Too many apartment marketers emphasize the latter. But the principal focus of every apartment marketer should be leases, which they can boost by having a website that engages prospective residents.
