AIM Special Report: Methods to Connect With Resident Interests
What attracts renters? It's not always the flashiest features. Here are some tips to make the mundane more interesting and the hard-to-quantify come across.
Attracting residents isn’t only about marketing a community’s most unique features. It also helps to focus on what interests residents the most. And that isn’t always easy to depict. During this year’s Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference, REACH by RentCafe Vice President Esther Bonardi and LCP Media Chief Marketing Officer Izzy Carunungan offered some tips to make the mundane more interesting and the hard-to-quantify come across.
Take, for example, the apartment features ranked as the greatest must-haves in the recently published RentCafe.com Rent Your Happy Place Survey. No. 1 was in-unit laundry, most appealing for 63 percent of the 5,471 respondents from Nov. 8 to Dec. 9, 2024. That was followed by “plenty of closet & storage space.”
“It’s not a fancy thing, but if they care about it that much, seeing is believing—you do need to picture it,” Bonardi declared. You don’t have to zoom in on the laundry machines—although you could—but you should at least include them in your amenities gallery. (Keep in mind that a RentCafe.com study of 10,110 renters last year found that 73 percent were influenced most by interior photos, while 83 percent ranked floor plan- or unit-specific virtual tours important or very important.)
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Make sure to include related features “that people would connect with,” Carunungan suggested. Are the laundry room countertops granite? Be sure they show up in the photo.
And take advantage of textual opportunities to provide more detail, with a focus on what’s relatable and what will interest people the most. Include the washer/dryer model and size in the caption or descriptive text, for instance. Mention the granite countertops in the caption. For a closet, more meaningful than the measurements, Bonardi said, may be the number of items it can hold. That way, it “seems more real, builds more trust,” she explained.
The same goes for the reserved or covered parking that respondents rated as their greatest community amenity must-have. “Think of creative ways to photograph unsexy features,” Carunungan advised. A close-up angled to show a reflection of the painted parking lines extending out behind the car can make it more interesting, for instance. Just be careful to block out personal information such as the license plate and look out for any defects you won’t want showing up in the picture.
A sense of home
Also challenging is depiction of the qualities renters rate highly. When asked about community characteristics important in their happy place, 62 percent of survey respondents put safety and security at the top of the list, followed by well-maintained, clean common spaces at 53 percent and “a sense of home” at 51 percent.
Safety may be the easiest to depict, although Bonardi cautioned to never claim your community is secure. “You can’t promise that.” Instead, highlight your good crime rating if you have one, or depict a Ring doorbell if you use them. “Think about how to carefully and responsibly share information about safety and security,” she advised.
Creating a sense of home may be more challenging. Carunungan recommended introducing the leasing team through a video or involving them in video promotion for an upcoming event. “Talking about people and how you make connections (is) a great way to create that sense of home.”
Similarly, with locational preferences prioritizing neighborhood safety, area walkability, and proximity to shopping, public transportation and dining and entertainment, you can employ interactive maps, walkability scores, drone videos and other neighborhood views to illustrate your strengths. You can even upload your visual collection to a Google Maps view to showcase your property or the neighborhood it’s in, Carunungan suggested.
And don’t forget to highlight your green space. That also ranks high among preferences and can make a big difference in whether and how quickly a prospect leases a unit.
