Need More Property Management Leads? These Strategies Will Help You Get More Leads and Clients
By Landon Murie
February 6th, 2021 (updated)
Want to grow your property management company?
So you're a property manager looking for ways to generate more leads online?
You have come to the right place for a comprehensive list of strategies that property management companies use to grow and scale their businesses.
We are going to outline the tactics, strategies, and marketing ideas we've found to be most effective so that you can start attracting more rental property owners who need your property management services.
Ready to get more leads? Let's go!
Property owner leads fall into two categories:
1. Actively Seeking and Interested (inbound lead)
These property owners are already looking for a property manager. You want to be found by these people the most, because they are the hottest leads who are already looking to sign up with a management company. You'll get found by these leads by focusing on the digital strategies we will cover today.
2. Self Managing and/or Unaware (outbound lead)
These property owners are self-managing their property and might not even be aware of what a good property manager is. Either that, or they are just not interested in the concept of hiring a property manager. These owners are going to be harder to reach, because they are not looking for a property manager. This requires a lot more time and effort through activities like cold calling (who has time for that?) in addition to strong sales and follow up skills.
Because of the difference in these lead types, the strategies we will talk about today cover the more preferable "Actively Seeking" property owners and how you can reel them in.
What should you be spending to acquire new clients?
Before choosing what strategies you want to utilize, it's fairly important to understand what the value of a new client is to your property management business.
Different ways of getting leads come with different costs, and you want to know what makes the most sense for your situation and your budget.
Here is how you calculate the profitability and lifetime value of a new property owner client:
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For simple math, let's say that your average management fee per client is $100 per month, and on average, clients will have you manage their property for 4.5 years.
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Multiplying the $100 per month x 54 months (4.5 years) will give us the estimated lifetime revenue that the client will generate over the 4.5 years.
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That total comes out to $5,400. Meaning on average, a new property owner client is worth $5,400 in lifetime revenue to your business.
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Now, if your average profit margin per managed property is 70%, that would mean your profit for an average property management client is $3,780 ($5,400 x 70%)
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This means that a new client's lifetime value, or profit, is $3,780. This leaves you a lot of room in the budget for what you can spend on lead generation activities.
Even if you had to spend $1,000 on lead generation in order to get that single client, you would still profit significantly over the years from that client alone, at $2,780.
What does this mean?
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that in most cases - depending on your own profit margin and monthly management fees - new clients are extremely valuable and will add to your bottom line.
Let's move on from the nerdy stuff and get into the actual strategies you can use to increase your inbound lead volume.
Lead Generation Tactics to Get More Property Owner Leads and Grow:
The strategies you use and the budget you have to spend on lead generation will be different depending on what stage/size your business is in.
Larger, established companies might have bigger budgets and more resources they can allocate toward this.
Smaller companies that are just getting started might focus on some of the most essential needs and put off others until later when the cash-flow allows.
To make this easier, we will separate our list of strategies into 2 categories:
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Critical strategies for new or small property management companies
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Advanced strategies for established property managers (already managing 50+ doors)
1. Critical Strategies for New or Small Property Management Companies Getting Started
No matter what stage your company is in, you can't ignore these first few items. If you do, you'll miss out on both short-term growth and long-term growth.
Most property owners check a few things when they are looking for a property manager to hire. If you don't have these covered, you will simply lose a lot of opportunities to your competitors.
-You Need a Stunning Website That Wows and Converts
What do you do when you are thinking about hiring a company and you want to learn more about their services and expertise? You check out their website.
Rental property owners are no different, and they usually want to check out your website whether they originally found you online or not.
Your website is one of the first chances you have to impress potential leads and build trust with them. Comparing the first glance on websites below, which would you be more impressed with? Probably the more modern design on the right?
Having an up-to-date website that is fully SEO optimized and acting as your salesman 24/7 is important for your company at any stage. Regardless of your size, it's a huge factor that is going to build trust and confidence with potential property management clients. It will bring in leads for you while you sleep (literally).
Evaluate your current website compared to your top competitors, how does it stack up?
You might want to ask others for their opinion or even get the opinion of a marketing professional, since your own opinion is likely a little biased. If you need a new website, or you don't have a website yet, start looking at property management website options.
-Getting Reviews and Improving Your Reputation Online
Along with checking out your website, prospective clients are also going to check out your online reputation. People want to know that they will be working with a reputable company who takes care of client concerns and has a lot of satisfied clients.
Which of these companies below would you want to work with based off of the reviews? You likely wouldn't even need to think about it.
Unfortunately for property managers - as you may already know - tenants are often the ones who feel unhappy enough to go online and voice their frustrations and complaints, whether justified or not.
Because of this, property management companies often have poor online ratings, and need to be working proactively to improve their reputation. You should see this as an opportunity to stand out by having a better reputation and rating than a lot of your competitors who are ignoring this critical blind-spot.
Your prospective clients who find you online are going to look at your reputation and maybe even read some specific client reviews, so make sure you are doing what you can to improve this and get your happy clients to share their experiences online!
If you are a new company and don't have a reputation, you are in luck:
Start off right by utilizing a system to ask happy owners and tenants to share their experience with an online review posted on your Google business listing, Yelp, or Facebook.
If you are an existing company and already suffer from a bad reputation:
Get help with your reputation management and start piling up more 5 star reviews from happy clients to increase your rating and drown out the negatives. Respond to negative reviews genuinely, and try to be reasonable (we know it's just impossible sometimes!)
2. Advanced Strategies for Property Managers Who Want To Grow and Scale Their Business (already managing 50+ doors)
-Create a content marketing plan for your website
Creating helpful, unique, and in-depth website content that answers property owner questions is a great way to generate inbound Landlord leads for months and years to come.
In order to do this, you will need to create informative content that is based on your local keywords or "search phrases" which property owners are searching for online. This will attract the right searchers to your website.
Creating the right type of content and doing it the right way is critical. This is a major foundation for your marketing campaign and if it's not done properly, it won't be of much benefit.
You can create SEO friendly content by following these guidelines below:
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Answer real questions property owners have with helpful info
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Focus on your target audience and your keywords
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Provide real value, give people helpful info they can actually use (like this article, for example)
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Go long with it - longer descriptive content is loved by search engines
If you need help, consult with a professional marketing agency that specializes in doing this.
-Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies
Remember when we talked about being found online by the property owners who are actually ready to hire a property manager and "actively seeking"? Focusing on advanced local SEO strategies and implementing them properly is one of the most beneficial ways to do that.
Being found organically on search engines like Google is the ideal way to get inbound leads because all you need to do is sit and wait. Property owners come to you and reach out to you themselves. No chasing down Landlords at meetings, no begging for referrals, no cold calling.
You can be found by property owners on Google in two spots: Local results and organic results.
Local "map pack" result
Organic Results
Each of these requires many different advanced SEO strategies and knowledge regarding:
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Keyword research and content mapping
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Technical optimization
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Local business listings and directories
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Analyzing your competitors strategies
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Content outreach and link building (the hardest part and holy grail)
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Reputation signals
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Website Updates
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Monitoring and reporting
SEO is more of a long-term play that can pay off big-time with organic calls and clicks for months and years to come. The only minor downside is that it's not an overnight ordeal. This is an investment into your business, and has to be done correctly with patience and consistency.
If you are a company who wants to scale in the coming months and years, you should consider working with a company who specializes in SEO for property managers.
-Run Paid Ads on Google (PPC)
Another way to be found by property owners who are looking for property management is to run Google Ads that will show up in the search results when someone types in something related to local property management.
A Google text Ad would appear something like this:
Google text ad example
You can choose what specific Google searches your ad will be shown for, such as:
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"property management in (city or county)"
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"property management company in (city or county)"
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"property managers in (city or county)"
You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. When they click on your ad, they will go to the landing page you have set up on your website.
Running ads on Google is great lead generation strategy for property managers, but you need to make sure that you know what you are doing related to keyword match types and negative keyword lists, among many other considerations. If you don't, you will waste a lot of money on unwanted ad clicks from searches you are not even targeting, or areas you don't want to target.
-Email Marketing to Your List of Property Owners
If you have a list of property owners that you have compiled from website forms or other lead magnet strategies, you can develop a sequence of automated emails that go out periodically with updates and local property management related info. This will help you stay on these owners minds so that you can be the first person they think of when they have a question or need help managing their rental property. There are a lot of CRM options out there, but LeadSimple is a CRM specific for property managers you might consider checking out. We use it ourselves here at Goodjuju and some of our clients use it as well.
-Create Helpful and Informative Videos to Show on Your Website
People tend to hire companies they feel stronger connections with. Rental property owners are no different.
To create a more personalized experience and build more trust with your prospective leads, having videos on your website to introduce your company and your services is a great hack that you can use to maximize your brand confidence and trust. There are also potential SEO related benefits because people will be spending more time on your website page - referred to as dwell time - which appears to be a metric search engines care about and monitor.
Your videos don't necessarily have to be expensive. You can film them and put something together yourself if you don't have much of a budget. The more professional the better, but the most important thing is being genuine and building a connection.
Now you are ready to take over the world (or just get some leads)
These lead generation strategies really do work if you put in the time and effort. You could always take the easier route and hire a professional to take care of them for you. Contact us at Goodjuju if you have any questions or need help getting started with these tactics.
Choose what makes the most sense for you and your business and dive right in, head first.
Seriously, what are you waiting for?
We Help Property Managers Get More Leads
Hear from some of our clients
Been working with Landon almost a year now and we went from a brand new PM startup to pretty much dominating search results in our market in about 6 months time, would definitely recommend!
-Ryan Vienneau
Landon is the best to work with. Very honest and on top of things. Seeing great results from our SEO efforts and his web design.
-Brandon Arnold
From the very beginnings I was very impressed with Landon and what Goodjuju brings to the table. As a new start up, we knew it was going to take time to catch traction and get the attention of the public to fuel growth for the business. I was pleased at how QUICKLY this could be accomplished through the proven methods that Landon uses. It was great to be able to actually see and measure the results we were paying for to see our name rank higher and higher each month with his tools and processes. He has been a pleasure to work with and I would highly recommend using his services!
-Bradley Cotton
Landon, has produced some good results for my company. I was on page 33 of google and he got me to page 1 in about 3 months. I am finally on the map and received some good leads because of it.
-Antonio D'Alberto
We have been using Landon and Goodjuju for our Property Management SEO for the last several months. Our rankings have gone up significantly since that time. Landon responds promptly to any communication that we have.
-Matthew VanHoughton
We have been working with Goodjuju for about 4 months and we have seen a steady increase on Googles rankings. They are consistent in their communication and have done a great job so far
-John Garvin
I am not well versed in SEO or online marketing but Landon’s initial presentation was stellar to say the least. He explained in detail what he could do, would do and has done so far for my company. We are a smaller firm so we were hidden from google, several clicks from the 1st page. Goodjuju has changed that & our business is growing at a substantial rate. 100% recommend.
-Charles Tripp
Landon and Goodjuju have been an instrumental and integral part of our direct online marketing efforts. His laser focus and knowledge of the property management industry has directly contributed to an increase in online quality leads. Very timely in communicating & extremely knowledgeable in all aspects of SEO for Property Management Companies.
-Shon Lorg
In just 4 months Landon raised us from 11th on google to 3rd. I honestly was not expecting such quick results am and thrilled. On top of real results, Landon has been great to work with. He communicates very clearly, and provides an update each month on what he is working on along with valuable data on our current search results. I would highly recommend working with Good juju.
-Seth Golding
Great company that has helped my rankings on Google for multiple different companies! Highly recommend!
-Nik Boone
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