This may be the most powerful tool in your box, and one that other landlords would never think of using but sets you head and shoulders apart from competing landlords.
What do you say to prospective tenants to keep them from even thinking about renting from another landlord? Maybe nothing will help if your property doesn’t fit their needs. But how many do you lose to other landlords? How many prime candidates say “we need to think about it” and end up being gobbled up by another rental property owner?
You can chop that number way down with the preemptive marketing strike.
You can immediately put all other landlords on the defensive, without their even knowing they have been preempted, if you warn prospective tenants that there are some vital considerations that they need to think about before they make their decision about a place to live.
How about this one. Did you know that most landlords get no training in rental property management at all? It’s true. The vast majority of them have never even heard of an apartment, landlord, or rental owners association, much less attended a class or a meeting. But you have. Why is that important? It means that those other landlords don’t know about the latest trends, techniques and legal issues in property management. Membership enables you to serve your customers, your tenants, better.
So after they have talked to you, what’s one of the things a prospective tenant will ask another landlord? “Do you belong to your local rental owners association?” What will be the answer? “Well, no, I don’t have time.” Or, “what’s that?”
By setting up a preemptive strike you immediately get tenants thinking in the direction you want them to.
Do you know that many landlords don’t respond to repair complaints the same day? So you say, “we respond to repair complaints within eight hours,” (or whatever). The next landlord they talk to will then be forced into the position of answering a question he or she never thought about before. Chances are the answer will be nowhere near as powerful as your preemptive strike because you thought it out first and know what to warn them about.
A couple of others. Did you know that many landlord don’t have a regular maintenance program? That means properties might look a little shabby after a while or things might break in a tenant’s home when preventive maintenance would have prevented it. But you have such a program: as a result your properties are places tenants can be proud to call home.
Did you know that many landlords don’t enforce the rules of the complex consistently? You do because we have found that it makes for a better place to live for all the people who rent from us.
You can probably think of a couple more things you do that you can express in such a way that they will become a preemptive marketing strike. Think of four or five, then use them to warn prospective tenants about the dangers they face renting from just any landlord.
Let’s add one more idea about the preemptive strike. Harry Beckwith in his 1997 book Selling the Invisible (available from Amazon both as an ebook and hardcopy) in the chapter “The Possible Service” writes about taking customer service one step beyond what even your customers ask for or could even think to ask for.
He divides customer service into three historical stages. Stage One consists of meeting minimum acceptable standards. “Get a basic, acceptably reliable product. Buyers accept this minimal product—the first car, the first VCR , and the first fast-food restaurant—because they desire the unique benefits is offers. Buyers will accept that good with some bad—typically the fact that bugs aren’t out and the price is high.” Tenants who don’t expect too much, who are young and living on their own for the first time, many times fall into that category, as well as people who aren’t too particular, or who figure they’re never going to get a great place to live, anyway.
In Stage Two, you start getting competition. You have lots of that as a rental owner and manager. “Differentiation of this core product [housing] becomes vital. Enter the marketers,” continues Beckwith. “They listen and make refinements the customers ask for: more colors, an ashtray so that drivers can smoke, and later an AM/FM radio. Answering customer needs is the driving force during stage two of an industry. Stage two is market-driven.” That is rental property now.
“Few companies enter stage three,” writes Beckwith. “These companies are in the pantheon of the marketing gods—the Disneys, Federal Expresses, and Lexuses. Disney entered the stage when it created amusement parks that went beyond what customers said they needed—or could ever have imagined.” The surveys companies took had hit dead ends. Customers no longer could think of what else they wanted, but the companies’ missions became surprising the customer.
Beckwith concludes the chapter by saying, “Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.
Some larger apartment complexes work on creating things their residents would love with on-site child care, office services, decorating services, and valet cleaning services. Smaller rental owners and managers don’t have the size and capability to offer those things. And for the most part, if you rent single-family homes and small plexes, your tenants don’t want those particular items. Apartment dwellers many look for “five-star-hotel” amenities, but not single-family-home renters.
That is something to think about and plan for in your business. How can you surprise your prospective customers, the rental market, with things they would love? It requires a leap to thinking about what is possible, not just what your customers say they want. After you do all the things good tenants say they want, what differentiates you from the rest of the good rental owners and managers who have a place to rent?
It would be the unusual rental owner and manager who could come up with Stage Three features and services. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t want to try to think of some. If you do succeed in creating a great new idea, you will have to take the “good” tenants on a first-come, first-served basis.
While Stage Three is something to think about, Stage Two is something to do right now. Do the things that the cream-of-the-crop tenants expect and require, and you will get them. Many times even Stage Two will be enough to eliminate most of your competition for attracting the top-notch applicants. Most other rental owners won’t do it. Think of the preemptive strike you have there!
And so…
That’s how you package yourself. You think of the things you do well, the things that make you unique, the things that you do that other landlords may do but don’t tell anyone, and you make those selling points of YOU and your business. It is that simple and that powerful. Get it rented.