FIRE: Advertising

As an owner, one of my bugbears is marketing expense. Difficult to measure, seemingly always important, rarely presented in a satisfying manner.

Various Internet marketing schemes are reducing the cost and most of my management company partners claim that traffic through their own site drives much of the traffic. Presumably they have identified the appropriate keywords and provide multiple links to and from their property websites to pay for the SEO (search engine optimization) consultant.

With budget season upon me, we are moving even more strongly toward Internet advertising via national (r*nt.com, a*artments.com, e.g.) and more localized methods (c*aigslist, local media). All properties are down to one book and that is increasingly one of the group ads produced by the management company. Although I eschew broadcast media, I actually do use a radio spot in a rural market, which seems to have paid off. Having been victimized by a $1mm owner-directed campaign in 2003 that exhausted budgets and produced no gain in occupancy, finding a campaign that worked was probably my biggest surprise for the first half of 2008.