Recognize the top result in the image? Here’s a more zoomed-in shot.
We know, we know, not our best ad copy, but you get the idea.
One of the commitments we make to our listers is that MoveinMadison will be everywhere downtown Madison renters are, and having a presence on Adwords is just another piece of that marketing puzzle.
You’ll be seeing a lot of us there, along with anywhere else we can be of help to Madison renters desperate for a way to streamline their downtown Madison apartment hunt.
We get asked a lot about how our traffic numbers are coming along, so we decided to write a blog post that compares our traffic from last spring with our more established competitor’s, Campus and Downtown Living.
In short, the growth we’ve seen in traffic since March has wildly exceeded our expectations.
In fact, since March we’ve already had 2 months where we’ve totalled more unique visitors than Campus and Downtown Living.
Lemme repeat that. We beat them already…twice!
Did we mention they’ve been around since 2004, have those stupid pamphlets you see on every street corner in Madison, and pay for the top adwords spots for the biggest madison keywords?
That’s the value of a product renters actually want to use.
Traffic breakdown: Unique Visitors March 2012 – July 2012
March, 2012: 4,830 (CDLiving) vs. 3,285 (MoveinMadison)
April 2012: 4,889 (CDLiving) vs. 3,219 (MoveinMadison)
May 2012: 3,328 (MoveinMadison) vs. 2,986 (CDLiving) — MOVEINMADISON WINS
June 2012: 4,448 (CDLiving) vs. 2,719 (MoveinMadison)
July 2012: 3,080 (MoveinMadison) 2,484 (CDLiving) — MOVEINMADISON WINS
MoveinMadison Analytics
Campus and Downtown Living Analytics: (courtesy of Compete.com)
Madison Property Owners and Managers,
Apartment listing services, like ours, exist for one reason: renters like them.
The rental market (especially Madison’s) is so fragmented that renters need a way to organize all of their options in a fast, easy way.
Just like we all need Kayak to book a flight, renters need a way to ‘Search One and Done’ for apartments, too.
The problem is, for Madison landlords being included in such a listing listing service has always meant just about one thing: forking over huge sums to be included in a pamphlet.
Which made sense at first.
The Internet was in its infancy, didn’t have the widespread adoption it does now, and was not thought of as a place where business occurred. Pamphlets were still the best option out there for renters, so they remained the best place to advertise.
But, then something else happened.
In a matter of years the Internet went from being a fledgling new aspect of apartment marketing to just about the only game in town.
By 2009, almost 85% of renters, when asked what methods came to mind when searching for apartments, answered with two words: the Internet.
But, though the way renters found apartments changed, the apartment listing services responsible for aggregating apartments in Madison didn’t change with them.
Websites went up (pretty bad ones from what we can tell), but everything remained fundamentally the same: pamphlets first, online a very distant second.
Why? Because you can charge a heck of a lot more for a page in print than one online (just ask every major American magazine and newspaper).
We think it’s time for those backwards priorities to end.
Enough with the old business models that force landlords to pay for a bunch of pamphlets renters don’t even want.
MoveinMadison is an effort to make the way renters actually search the top priority for apartment listing services again. An apartment listing service that lives and breathes the web so when you spend time and money listing with us, you know your investment is going only toward reaching more renters where they actually are: online.
Oh, and one more thing.
Because we don’t have to print and distribute tens of thousands of pamphlets, our overhead is much lower than our older competitors.
That means we can pass on significant savings to you – and here’s the best part – without any reduction in overall renter interest, since almost every lead apartment listing services generate now originates online.
Your business constantly has to evolve to better serve your customers, we think it’s about time that happens in our space as well.
Sincerely,
Alec, Adam and Chad (The MoveinMadison Team)
I was in a bit of a rush when I snapped this picture at La Ville Apartments so I didn’t have time to actually scan the QR code to see where it directed to (perhaps a bad sign for QR codes in general?).
Either way, this is a great case study in effective QR code placement from Jean Duchrow, who manages the building for Forward Management.
The QR code is large, very noticeable, intriguing, and perfect for renters browsing buildings on foot (or friends of current renters interested in potentially moving into the building).
Assuming this directs to a mobile-optimized site, it’s a case study in best practices for QR Code use.
25% of renters search more than 10 (that’s right 10!) rental websites when looking for a new apartment.
At least, that’s according to a survey of more than 1,000 renters done by Rentbits in 2009.
The Stats:
Some of the findings from the Renbits survey:
The Takeaway(s):
1. The rental market is very, very fragmented, and is only getting worse.
From a landlord’s perspective, that means that a website and one other form of advertising just won’t cut it anymore. Renters have become increasingly web-savvy and conscientious, and as a result landlords need to be in multiple places online to truly maximize their properties’ exposure.
Syndication-type services such as Vflyer and Postlets are great (and for the most part, free) options to help you save time by syndicating your listings to many of the most popular sites online. We highly recommend them to all of our customers (rumor is the team at MoveinMadison may be developing a similar syndication service for landlords. More on that later).
2. Renters simply don’t have very good options.
Renters are forced to use multiple rental search websites because the sites available just don’t cut it. But, it doesn’t have to be that way.
When’s the last time you heard someone say they used multiple search engines to look something up? Or 10 flight-search websites to book a flight?
Never, right?
That’s why we started MoveinMadison. To finally give Madison renters what googlers and travelers have come to expect, a website that actually consolidates all the information they’re looking for in one place and on one easy-to-use interface.
They might be the only three things in the world that are certain.
Let us explain.
For those not familiar, Google has a tool called Google Insights for Search that allows you to see how much certain terms or groups of terms are searched for throughout the year on Google.
Obviously, as a startup focused on apartment search we were curious to find out when people start looking for a new place over the course of a year.
So, we checked out Google’s Rental Index, which combines search terms like ‘apartments for rent, rent, houses for rent’ to measure when people start looking for rental properties throughout the year.
We hypothesized there would be a pretty strong trend within each year and, well, we were right.
Trends in Google Rental Search, 2004 – 2012
Trends in Google Rental Searches, 2011
It’s important to point out that Madison’s rental season is very unique to say the least.
If we were able to just get stats on searches for Madison apartments, the peak between January and August would probably be smaller and there would undoubtedly be a second spike in late October through Early December when most of the campus renting gets underway.
So, while that does put a bit of a wrench in these numbers, knowing when exactly non-students and out-of-town renters typically are on google searching for a new apartment can help you better target an adwords or facebook campaign, make headway in new market niches, and know when to aggressively advertise different properties to maximize your ad spend.
What do you think? How else can landlords use these trends to more effectively market their properties?
There is no shortage of talk about the growing importance of mobile in any marketing medium, but apartment marketing has a particular way to benefit from increasing smart phone use.
Apps launched by some national rental listing sites like Padmapper and Apartments.com, which allow renters to view mobile listings, search for places based on their current location, and store their favorites to take with them on the go, have become exceedingly popular with renters.
And, with smart phone use already pretty substantial and only growing (especially amongst younger cohorts), mobile is undoubtedly an integral part of the future of apartment marketing.
So, what mobile strategies have you implemented? And what features would you like to see us develop to make MoveinMadison more mobile-friendly? Let us know in the comments.
Infographic by- GO-Gulf.com Web Design Company
You just received an email from a renter who is interested in one of your properties and wants more info.
Do you know the one thing you can do to increase your chances of getting their business by 250%?
According to a study done at MIT on the topic of Lead Response Management, and which is now making the rounds on hundreds of the largest blogs and online publications, the answer is simple.
Just respond to the email within 5 minutes.
According to the MIT study, if you call a lead five minutes after they attempt to contact you rather than waiting thirty you are 100 times more likely to make contact with them, 21 times more likely to qualify them as a lead, and almost two and a half times as likely to actually get their business.
In fact, the study showed that waiting too long to respond to a lead and continuing to push for contact after waiting for an extended period will seriously hurt your chances of contacting and qualifying a lead.
The takeaway here is pretty clear.
Fire off an email, phone call or text right away, or be prepared to lose a lot of cash.
We have to be honest.
The original focus of MoveinMadison was not how to make advertising properties online a better process for landlords. Rather, our mission was to simplify and streamline the search process for renters.
But, as we began to research and develop the site, learning more about the market we were planning to launch into, we realized the obvious point that you can’t have one without the other. That, if we were really going to do this well, we needed to make the site as valuable for landlords as we were hoping it would be for renters.
That’s when we started realizing just how much room for improvement and innovation there was on the landlord side of the spectrum.
So, here are the features we’ve built into MoveinMadison with those goals of innovation and improvement in mind.
So, a property management company with a portfolio that includes 250 properties, all with less than 20 units, would be able to list all of their properties on MoveinMadison completely for free, forever!
Placing a limit on the number of photos you can upload per listing is stupid. It hurts landlords and it hurts renters alike. So, we put an end to it.
Allowing renters to get a better idea of what a unit looks like online through extensive photos (and eventually panoramic imagery and video walkthrough tours as well) means those renters contacting you will be more qualified, resulting in less time wasted answering phone calls about the same questions and giving tours of properties a renter may not have any interest in.
4. Focus on Design and Ease of Use
At MoveinMadison we loathe bad web design. We spent weeks designing, building, and testing the landlord section of the site to make it incredibly simple and easy to use.
No craigslist inconveniences, online listing sites that look and feel like they’re from the 90’s, or agony trying to market your properties.
We’re here to make the process frictionless.
If you’re a property owner or manager interested in helping us make our product better please don’t hesitate to email our CEO, Alec, at alec@moveinmadison.com with any questions or suggestions you might have.
We’d love the feedback.