8 Leads in 45 Minutes

June 11th, 2010 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Apartment Marketing | 2 Comments »

Last week we wrote an article about what kind of ad you should post if you are looking for a roommate; we got some feedback and decided to combine the two options that we proposed and we had 8 people contact us, all very interested in moving in, within the first 45 minutes. That posting, in it’s brilliant tenant enticing entirety is reprinted here with my permission:

$750 Room for Rent July 1st

Hello everyone, we are looking for a new roommate to join us at our lovely 4 bedroom apartment. We are friends who have lived together for about a year; we spend a lot of time at our apartment telling jokes over beers and macaroni and cheese, but we also like to get out into the city, be it for dinner, drinks, concerts or outdoor activities, and have found our neighborhood to be conveniently located for all of these things.

Room for Rent: Very sunny, especially in the mornings, room overlooking Larkin Street in the front of our apartment available for a month to month rent.

We are: 3 dudes in our late 20s who all have steady jobs but are very silly, spend our weeks relaxing by telling jokes, inventing variations of macaroni and cheese and taking bike rides, climbing and surfing. We spend our weekends exploring either the city or heading out into the wilderness.

We are looking for: Someone about the same age, ideally looking for a girl, to maintain our old balance, but this is not necessary.

The Neighborhood: Has treated the 4 of us well; there are a ton of restaurants and bars, the best deli in the city is a block away and there are two grocery stores. Additionally, it is easy to get pretty much anywhere in the city from our apartment via bus lines and if you need a cab, you can walk one block and be on a main cab thoroughfare.

As a leasing agent, do you try to convey a sense of the community in your ads and descriptions?

We found that people clicked on the ad because of location and price and people sent us responses (leads) because the tone of the ad was appealing because people were viewed it less of an advertisement and more of the first sentence in a conversation, so they were more engaged and already had formed some kind of idea about us, therefore our apartment was memorable. For example, those silly references to mac and cheese kind of stuck with everyone who came to visit our apartment.

When people arrived they were kind of interested to see who these characters were, already knowing that the two most important factors, price and neighborhood, matched their search criteria.

And by the time they left, EVERYBODY wanted to move in.