Apartments are in the vanguard among online marketplace verticals, as more apartment owners take advantage of Web and mobile features to target prospects — especially younger prospects.
Indeed, apartment owners are increasingly leveraging video to show off floor plans and surrounding communities. They’re also using social media such as MySpace to differentiate their communities and give them a “vibe,” especially for higher end properties. They’re also using mobile-enabled sites to catch prospects as they drive by.
Organic search also comes into play. NCI, which produces ApartmentFinder, has seen the site jump 52.5 percent in the last six months, according to blog notes from Chairman Dan McCarthy. Indeed, new data from ComScore for March shows that among traditional apartment shopper media with print and websites, ApartmentFinder now has the second most used apartments site after ForRent. (Apartment pureplays like Rent.com and Apartments.com might have higher overall traffic).
“We haven’t driven our growth through spending a lot of money on keywords and unqualified traffic,” says McCarthy. “We’ve focused on optimizing the long tail of organic search. We’ve focused on creating a simple product for consumers that gives them lots of ways to interact with the apartment communities we list.”
It boggles my mind when a community is *not* listed on online apartment search sites. I’ve signed a lease three times without ever visiting the city and going by online video/reviews alone; all the unlisted properties never stood a chance of getting my business because I never knew they existed.
(I also don’t understand apartment complexes that pay someone to stand on the road and wiggle a sign. But I digress.)