This is an excerpt from a comment Eric Brown, from Urbane, just left on the blog post titled Renewal increases.
We have a Resident Referral program, and one specific resident has gotten three net rentals for us, which makes your point, what if we focused much more of our Marketing and Branding resources directed internally on our existing Resident Base, what would you have to do to become self sustainable, meaning your customer, in our case the residents did most of the rentals through referrals, it seems that the resources are really leveraged then, We have done more to enhance the existing customer/residents experience, thus they are happier and they are promoting the product, just how many of them would you need to not have to look outward fo r business…
I have posted a number of times about teaching residents how to use Craigslist and the various other social media tools to reach potential residents. I can hear it now, "what of fair housing," "what if they write a silly ad," "what if…. I would ask, "how many times have you screwed it up?" "How many times have your agents screwed it up?" Hundreds of times? Thousands of times? That is not suggest that I don’t think it’s important to monitor. It is to suggest that I am a fan of teaching your evangilists how to be evangelical. Don’t just assume they will talk about you, give them the mega-phone (read; social media tools) to do it with.
Great comment Eric. Thanks, as always, for sharing.
M
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