Real Estate Investor Articles

If it's time to fill a vacancy for one of your rentals, you will want to get the maximum marketing exposure possible. Chances are, that if you are reading this article online, you already understand the value of the internet. Three lines of description in your local print newspaper is no longer enough to get the phone ringing with enough interested renters in most markets.

With the widespread availability of the internet and the ease of accessing information on it, most of your potential tenants expect much more than a brief description of the raw data of their future dwelling – i.e. beds, baths, square footage and rent. Instead of spending all day on the weekend driving around looking at potential rental units, most of your tenant pool will prefer to browse through full color photographs of available rentals from the comfort of their favorite computer station. Many internet sites even offer virtual tours of available units, so to be competitive in our current marketplace, you need to make sure that you have the marketing out to reach all of these internet-surfing apartment hunters.

In addition to posting ads with full color photographs on popular sites like Craigslist,

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you should research any online apartment locator sites that cater to your city. If you are managing your own properties, it may be worth it to list your properties on one of these sites that provides full online virtual tours of your properties. Many of these sites only charge you a fee (which could be as much as the whole first month's rent and may include showing and pre-qualifying tenants) if they provide you with a qualified tenant. Depending on your level of internet savvy, it may be worth it to get this additional exposure and get your units rented faster.

If you have a property manager that does all of your marketing and tenant placement for you, be sure to ask them what kind of marketing that they are doing. If they aren't utilizing online resources, they probably aren't doing enough to get your units rented. I recently spoke to one property manager who told me that they completely abandoned using newspaper ads because they simply weren't effective. My advice: if you haven't adapted your marketing strategies to the internet, now is the time to learn how.