How Apartment Managers Can Stop Playing The ILS Game

Rent.com, Trulia, Zillow, Apartments.com – chances are your team deals with one or more of these or other apartment listing sites. And if they’re a big part of your business, you’re all too familiar with the high cost and headache that can come with staying competitive on those listing sites.

But what if you could stop being a slave to the ILS game, saving your company time, money, and making you look better than the competition?

There’s a way to stop playing the ILS game. What your team can do to lessen your reliance on ILS’s is to show up in more places online, and to build a better relationship with prospects.

Show Up In More Places, Get Vetted Leads, Lessen Your Apartment ILS Reliance

ILS companies play a numbers game: they get so much online traffic and so many eyes on their countless apartment listings that they can claim to get you X number of leads per month. The problem here is that these leads aren’t vetted whatsoever (except maybe by geography), and these prospects may be at any point in the decision process. So while you may end up with those X leads the ILS promised you, they’re low quality leads that will usually end up wasting your leasing team’s time chasing them.

When you diversify where your properties appear online, you’ll find that your leads will typically be more qualified, and they’re searching for what you’re offering, rather than just any random apartment.

Below are just a few places that most apartment companies can improve their presence.

Online Listings

When we talk about apartment listing management, we mean more than just ILS listings. Basically any record of your business, featuring your address, phone number, and URL can count as a listing. And ensuring that your properties are both present and that the info is consistent can increase awareness and improve your search engine rankings.

While you can take the time to manage your listings manually, it usually isn’t worth the several hours it will take for every property you manage. Typically, enlisting the help of a service like Yext Powerlistings or Resident Spark’s proprietary listing management software is a smarter way to go.

Social Media Advertising & Remarketing

The ad targeting features in Facebook, coupled with the ability to target people who’ve already visited your site via remarketing, are some of the best ways to land high-quality leads in the apartment space. Your team knows how selling is a multitouch process, and these tools help you facilitate those touchpoints.

Email

Email marketing, particularly drip campaigns for prospects, is one of the best ways to increase awareness and keep your properties at the forefront of your prospects’ minds. Because email is one of the few places you can have some control over when your prospects receive a message, it offers a unique advantage for multifamily companies.

SEO

We’ll be honest, no matter how much you invest in SEO for your apartments, you’re probably never going to outrank the big ILS websites when people search for “apartments in my area.” However, a good chunk of people searching on Google don’t want to deal with an ILS, they want to see individual apartment sites. Improving your search engine rankings to land at least on the first page can land you qualified leads, especially those who are looking for an apartment in a very specific area, or one that offers specific amenities like pet-friendly apartments or a fitness center.

Build a Better, More Memorable Relationship With Prospects

Getting your properties’ names out in a number of places is a good start to get qualified leads, but one of the most effective ways to close those leads is to create a personalized customer journey.

Having multiple touchpoints over time is more likely to result in long-term residents and successful sales funnels than sinking huge money into an ILS. In that way creating a better relationship with your prospects ties directly into showing up in more places online.

Creating Multiple Touchpoints for Potential Customers

Two of the most effective ways to build an ongoing relationship with prospects are through email and remarketing. But to take full advantage of these tools, you need to be able to use prospect data from your Property Management Software (PMS) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

By integrating your PMS or CRM with your email and remarketing efforts, you’re able to stay in contact with prospects when they’re most likely to be receptive to your messages. For example, a fully-fledged email program can automate emails to be sent to anyone who:

• Scheduled a tour or just recently completed a tour of your property.
• Requested pricing information for an apartment unit.
• Expressed interest in your apartment close to a year ago and didn’t move in, but may be looking for a new apartment again this year.
• Has filled out an application for your apartment community.

Likewise, a remarketing campaign can use a prospect’s previous interaction with your apartment (internet history, how much time they’ve spent on your site, and more) to target a prospect specifically where they are in the decision process.

What both of these do is create a more personally tailored journey for a potential customer, both making them feel valued as a customer that you’re paying attention to them, as well as “nudging” them in the right direction with appropriate calls to action at different points in time. It creates a much more memorable experience than static ads and ILS listings, and when it comes to big decisions like where to live, the more personal you can be, the better.

How To Start Undoing Your ILS Shackles

Like most problems, the first step in fixing your ILS reliance is realizing you have a problem. The second step? Get help. Resident Spark is helping multifamily and apartment management companies improve every facet of their client communication, and we can help yours as well. Schedule a call with us below to quit the ILS game, and take back control of your strategy.