Apartment Marketing: L.I.S.T Method for Leasing Using Google AdWords

Over the last decade, the apartment marketing experts at MultiFamily Traffic have developed the gold standard for maximizing clicks and visits from qualified renters. These AdWords campaigns result in maximum leases signed, while minimizing the spend it takes to lease units. The best trust MultiFamily Traffic and in this article, I will share some of our most powerful secrets.

Apartments are very different from all other products and services that advertise with Google. This article will cover some basic best practices we call L.I.S.T.

By remembering the “L.I.S.T” with your AdWords campaign you will put your property in a much better position to sign leases, save the community money and protect your staff, residents and the property from potential safety issues and legal action that can result from negligence in managing your AdWords campaign.

Using the MultiFamily Traffic L.I.S.T method will help you maximize, double and maybe even quadruple, your conversions into leases.

Fortunately for you, many of your competitors in property management aren't following these best-practices that MultiFamily Traffic has made famous.

Presenting the L.I.S.T for AdWords management that will get you more leases and keep your community safe:

Local: The “L” in L.I.S.T stands for “local”. It is Leasing 101, your best prospect is across the street. Yet, so many AdWords campaign managers run nationwide campaigns for a property.

The logic they have for doing so is to catch people from out-of-state looking to move to the area. This logic is great if you are working on organic SEO rankings (free traffic). But when you are managing an AdWords campaign every click costs you money and has the opportunity cost of not being used on someone local. When used properly, AdWords is a very powerful and surgical instrument.

There is no apartment community in any market that cannot lease 100% of their units by only showing ads to local people that can visit the community that day. Showing national ads can waste valuable budget dollars and the leasing agents time. The traffic on Google is virtually unlimited and if you properly utilize its power to hyper-target campaigns to only hot, qualified LOCAL renters, you will get much better results than a national campaign.

Example: The example in the video was filmed from a search based in or Denver, CO headquarters. We searched Seattle and Portland and in both cases found properties that paid for us to click on their ad from hundreds of miles away from the property. Many of these properties were also offering up to 6 weeks free rent. When you use AdWords to its full potential you can target the hottest local renters that are the best fit all while spending a lot less with Google and reducing your need for giveaways and promotions like “6 weeks free”.  

Ideal: The “I” in L.I.S.T stands for “ideal”. If you are spending money for someone to see an ad for your property you are wasting your money unless that person is an ideal fit for your community. Pay-per-click is extremely effective but it can also be extremely expensive if you use a shotgun approach. If you can afford to show the community to 1000 prospects, you should use the power of Google to strike surgically ensuring that all 1000 of the people you just paid to show the community to were hot, qualified, ideal renters your property managers can close quickly and easily.

A perfect example of this is shown in the video we searched the term “Affordable Apartments in Miami” and were shown an ad for a swanky Coral Gables community that anyone with big bucks to spend would love to live at. Not only did this community violate the “L” for local rule by showing us in Denver an and for a community in Coral Gables (side note: we searched “Miami” and the property is in Coral Gables, a double-L violation) they also violated the “I” rule by wasting money showing a luxury community to renters looking for affordable and cheap apartments.

Can you imagine how frustrated the leasing agents must be at this property? They get clicks but no calls. The people who do call waste the leasing agents time talking about a community they can’t afford. The ones who press the issue and apply, don’t qualify for the lease.

Here is the most terrifying part; Chances are nobody knows why this is happening. The marketing department is NOT targeting affordable apartments. They simply don’t understand the powerful yet complex algorithms that are the backbone matrix of AdWords and they have no idea that this community is advertising to the affordable market. Unless you have over 1000 hours of hands-on training and experience and a deep understanding of negative keywords, you would never know this was happening or how to prevent it.

So now the property managers are being hammered by the regionals for not hitting their numbers, some may even get fired other may quit. The only thing everyone can agree on is that the property is “OVERPRICED” so they try a promotion like 6 weeks free. All the while they were showing a Mercedes product to people that are looking to use the public bus. If the campaign targeted ideal renters the community would get calls exclusively from high net worth renters looking for exactly that type of unit. Everyone is happy nobody feels like a bad leasing agent and no one quits or gets fired.

Safe: The “S” in L.I.S.T stands for “safe”. Apartments are not like selling t shirts, restaurant reservations or toys. This is a serious business and you are your customers are people that have to live in your community, a community that you spent 10’s of millions of dollars on. You need to make sure that your marketing efforts are doing everything possible to block traffic that is potentially unsafe for your residents, your staff and your assets.

Most AdWords campaigns for apartments including those managed by the largest REITs or even the best digital marketing agencies on Madison Ave. do not realize that they are spending money to direct unsafe traffic to an apartment community. 

It is commonplace to see a luxury apartment community advertising the property to felons, don’t believe me, search Google for “Felon Friendly Apartments” in any city. This happens because the team running the AdWords campaign does not understand AdWords core algorithms and how to properly use them. They have limited or no experience blocking Apartment Based Negative Keywords (ABNK’s if you work at MultiFamily Traffic) and end up showing a luxury community to ex-convicts and credit risks without anyone knowing, including the campaign manager.  

Negative keywords are one of the most important, yet under-looked, settings in AdWords. They allow you to exclude your ads from showing up for similar, but unrelated, searches. They are considered one of the keyword match types, but they match differently than their regular counterparts. If you don’t have a handle on negative keywords it may be time to hire a professional, this is serious and very high stakes. Your safety and the safety of your residents and staff is at stake.

Example: “felon friendly apartments in Austin” In this Example, from my Denver, CO office, I found Corazon, Luxury Living in East Austin. Corazon has missed the L,I,S in LIST.

1.   The community is not following our LOCAL rule by showing the ad to prospects that are not Local. I found the ad for these luxury apartments in Austin from our Denver headquarters

2.   The community is not following our ideal rule by showing the ad felons who are not the ideal prospects for this property that describes itself as “high-end clean, contemporary, and eco-friendly homes with a rich mix of facilities and services for business and recreation”

3.   The community is not following our SAFTEY rule by showing the ad to felons claiming that this luxury property features “felon friendly apartments in Austin”. Even if the tenant screening process stops felons from moving in, they are open to retaliation from upset and embarrassed candidates that came onsite thinking they found a high-end community for felons only to be turned away. If nothing else, the community is paying big money every month to show ads that attract attention from potentially unsafe renters.

Traffic: When MultiFamily Traffic was founded over a decade ago our core principle was that the best way to lease apartments was to provide leasing agents only the most qualified, local prospects. We used the name “traffic” because we also knew the most common mistake that management companies make is underestimating the volume of traffic it takes to close a lease. You can’t expect even the best leasing agent to close 3 out 4 prospects. Our philosophy is to provide the property with 10 times more qualified traffic than they think they need to occupy all units. By doing this, the leasing agents can shine, the marketing departments can beat budgets and the owners can avoid promotions like “6 weeks free”. 

I hope you will be able to use our L.I.S.T method to improve your AdWords campaigns if you need help or would like us to manage your campaigns for you we would be delighted. Our phone is (888) 683-5885 and our website is www.MultiFamilyTraffic.com