Finding tenants for your multi-family property can be challenging, especially if you haven’t amassed a list of interested parties from previous searches.
However, in today’s era of social media, finding a new tenant doesn’t have to be a painful, drawn-out process. Here are some easy to implement suggestions you can use to quickly find potential tenants for your commercial investment property.
Post pictures of the unit and surrounding property on Pinterest
Pinterest has more than 100 million active users monthly. And it’s not only about food or arts and crafts: pinners are adding such diverse items as marketing articles, survival tips, and houses they’d like to buy.
If you don’t have an account, it’s easy enough to do so. You’ll want to open up a business account in order to do so. Here’s how…
Opening An Account On Pinterest
If you already have a personal account, you’ll still want to open up a business account to keep them separate.
- To open a business account, go here.
- Fill in your email, choose a password and add your business name.
- You will also be asked to specify the type of business you represent. You can choose other, or if you have incorporated your business, local business.
You’ll then be asked to follow 5 topics so that Pinterest can build a custom home feed for you. This is done because each time you log into Pinterest, you’ll be shown pins you may be interested in, pulled from other Pinterest users.
Once you choose 5 topics, you’ll be shown 5 categories to choose from. For example, if you choose real estate, some of the topics you’ll be shown include:
- real estate properties
- real estate quotes
- real estate marketing tips
Pinterest will then offer you the chance to add a Pinterest add-in to your browser. This makes it easy for you to add content you find while browsing the web to your Pinterest account. In addition to pictures, you can pin videos, slideshares and podcasts.
You can also upload pins to your account. As an investment property owner, you can upload images of your property and surrounding area, as well as videos of the property you’re trying to rent, slideshares about what the area is like (such as schools), and podcasts which can be audio clips from present or past tenants giving reviews of your property.
Pinterest will then spend a few seconds searching all of its boards for pins, based on the topics you’ve given, that might be of interest to you.
You’ll then be shown your home feed, and be given an opportunity to check your analytics, which gives you important information about your most popular pins, and the people who like them.
Although you can skip this for now, once you start pinning, it’s a good idea to check your analytics so you can keep track of which pins are doing well. This will tell you not only what areas people are interested in moving to, but will also give you a better idea what kind of content they are most interested in seeing.
Place An Ad On Facebook
Facebook is an excellent venue to generate interest in your rental unit.
And while you can simply post a picture of the unit and ask people to share it, the fact is that because Facebook has changed how often posts are viewed by your friends, it is unlikely even a quarter of the people you’re connected to will actually see your post.
But there is an easy way around it: running a simple ad on Facebook.
You can get an advertising campaign going to your ideal tenant for as little as $5 a day. Plus, Facebook has a feature called interest targeting. Interest targeting is like the secret sauce of advertising, because it allows you to choose exactly who you’d like to see the ad.
You can choose to show your ad only to residents of your city, and you can also choose to show the ad to people who are most like your ideal tenant. So, if you know that most of your tenants are young couples making under $50,000 a year with only one child, you can choose those characteristics when you create your ad.
The other great feature about Facebook is that unlike newspapers, or online classifieds, you can choose whether or not you’d like to pay to have as many prospects as possible to see your ad, or whether you’d like to pay only when a prospect performs a specified action (like visiting a contact page).
Here’s How To Get Started With Facebook Ads
Before you get started, it’s important to know how Facebook organizes your ads. Facebook ads can be broken down into three parts:
- Campaigns – This is where everything you create in Facebook ads is stored. In each campaign, there are ad sets.
- Ad sets – Ad sets let you choose to show ads to different audiences. So if you have an apartment to rent in Dallas, and another in San Antonio, you would need to create two separate ad sets, one for each city.
- Ads – These are the specific ads you create.
Choose an Objective
Go to Facebook Ads Manager. Once there, you’ll be asked to choose an objective. There are many to choose from, but the easiest one to start out with is Boost your posts. This allows you to show your “ad” – which is actually in the form of a post – to an audience you select.
Choose boost your post.
On the right side, a column will pop up called “page post engagement.” At the bottom, you’ll be able to choose which post you’d like to boost. Click to select it.
Next, go to the bottom right-hand corner and click the blue button Set Audience & Budget. That will take you to the section where you can set your audience, and set the amount you’d like to spend on the ad.
You’ll now see what are called “filters.” These are options you can choose to narrow down who your ad is displayed to. The first filter you’ll need to change is “location.” Here you can enter the exact city where your unit is located.
If you know the age of your typical tenant, you can adjust that as well.
You can narrow things down even further by clicking the “Browse” button. This will allow you to narrow your audience down according to their demographics:
Choose demographics, and you will be given the following sub-categtories:
Or, if your multi-family investment property is located next to a particularly large, well-known business, and you know that your available property would be especially attractive to them, you can target employees of that business.
Click on “employers.”
You will then be able to enter the name of the business or company. You can enter more than one business if you’d like. Keep in mind a business may not always appear on Facebook, but that could be because they are either too small, or you need to try entering the official version of the company name.
You can also choose to target potential tenants according to whether or not they have children.
Choose as many categories as are applicable.
Choose your budget
Facebook lets you choose how much you’d like to spend on your ad. You can either choose a lifetime budget, which is the total amount you’d like to spend the entire time the ad runs, or you can choose how much you’d like to pay per day.
For this purpose, it’s best to choose a daily budget. You can start with as little as $5, but your best bet is to start with between $10-$15. If you’d really like to go higher you can up to $20.
Your ad can either run continuously, which means that once it is approved, it will run until you shut it off, or you can choose a start and an end date to run your ad. Since this is a vacancy, you’ll want to keep the default choice of “run continuously.”
Next, you’ll choose whether or not you want to be charged according to how many times your ad is seen (impressions) or according to post engagement (how many likes, shares, and comments the post gets).
Since you don’t want to pay just because someone likes your post – and you want your ad to be seen by as many relevant people as possible- you will choose “impressions.”
You will then be charged a certain amount per 1,000 impressions (how many times the ad is seen). You’ll also be asked to choose how to bid: automatic or manual. Never choose automatic! Choose manual instead.
Once you choose manual, the box will automatically show a bid amount. To the right side, you will also see a range of the suggested bid amount. Choose the highest bid suggested, and add 10 cents to it. Then enter that into the box.
It is highly unlikely you will pay that amount, however this allows your ad to be seen by as many of the right people as possible. At any rate, the price is certainly lower than all other types of paid advertisement.
Next, you will choose what Facebook calls the ad creative. These are the pictures that go with the ad.
In reality, since you have already added a picture to your original Facebook post, you don’t need to change anything here. Simply choose “Place Order.” Facebook will review your ad, and once it is approved, you will be notified by email.
And that’s it! In less than thirty minutes, you have now advertised your vacancy to thousands of people who fit the profile for your ideal tenant.
Interested in buying a property? Please contact us by filling in the online application form.
