How to Find New Clients for Your Rental Properties for Under $10,000/Month

It might not seem like you need to do a lot of work to find clients for your rental properties, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The state of the housing market has led many companies to get a little lax in their outreach and new client acquisitions, but what’s going to happen when the dust settles and the rush slows down? If you don’t have good practices in place for finding and retaining new clients, you’re not going to keep up with the competition. 

More importantly, you’re not going to be able to keep your business growing. To continue to see growth, you have to continue to cultivate new clients. There are a lot of different methods and tactics out there that you can choose from. Some may work better for you, and there is certainly more to do than what’s on the list below, but these are among the most popular and successful options out there. 

If you want to make sure that you’ve got new clients coming into your rental business or property management company, here are five tactics to consider. 

Tactic #1: Build your network 

Cost: Free, unless you pay for memberships, networking events, etc. 

Professional networking is a critical part of any business, especially in the rental property and real estate market. It’s who you know and which groups you belong to that will get your business noticed and help you generate a steady stream of clients. Take the time to join local rental groups, professional associations, and other groups so that you can improve your visibility and your professional reputation. 

Networking allows you to gain credibility and prove that your business is an authority within the industry. It gives you a chance to make connections that can fuel your client list for years to come. Take advantage of that when you’re working on building your professional reputation with networking.  

Tactic #2: Get engaged on social media 

Cost: Free, unless you pay for social media marketing help

Social media is not something that you can just set up and forget about. You need to make sure that you have business profiles on all the major sites, but you also need to use those accounts and engage with your audience. If you’re only spamming your feeds with rental listings, your followers are going to ignore your posts, or get annoyed and block them altogether. 

Have conversations. Share relevant and useful information. Interact with your potential clients and your existing clients on Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere, and watch how much more reputable your business becomes. Not only that, but when people see that you’re a real person, they’re going to be more inclined to interact with you and feel comfortable doing business with you. 

Tactic #3: Optimize your listings and local SEO 

Cost: $250-$2,500

Local SEO is critical to rental and real estate companies. Of all the things that get people’s attention, location is everything in finding a place to live. You’ll want to hire someone to help you with local optimization efforts if you’re not very Internet savvy, but you can also try to take on some of the work yourself if you’d like. Either way, you’ll still have plenty of room left in the budget for other things. 

Local optimization involves using location-based keywords in your content, but it also includes other efforts like:

• Boosting your contact information visibility 
• Streamlining your NAP (name, address, phone number) with a single, consistent listing
• Using your Google Business Profile 
• Getting reviews and testimonials
• Create directory listings and backlinks

This can take some time to get everything the way that you want it, but that’s what the pros are for. They can help you create and execute a local SEO strategy that helps you outrank the competition and get noticed by more clients. Google reviews and a mobile-friendly website are worth highlighting here, too. Focus on those and watch your business soar. 

Tactic #4: Use referral marketing 

Cost: Free, unless you offer incentives 

Real estate is an industry where word-of-mouth marketing is still really effective. People feel better when they are renting properties from a place they know will deliver what they need and take care of them accordingly. People can get a lot more from a firsthand review or testimonial than from reading your website. Solicit reviews and referrals whenever you can. 

Consider offering discounts on rent or deposits for those who connect you with other potential tenants, and make sure that the new tenants get some kind of perk out of the referral, too. This will encourage more people to share your business with their friends and family, and it will show people that you appreciate them and their interest in your rental properties. 

Tactic #5: Outsource when you can to get more for your marketing dollars 

Cost: $250-$5,000, depending on what you outsource

You have a lot to do in a day. You have to manage your listings, take care of tenants, cultivate new clients and leads, and the list goes on. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all on your own. Outsourcing can help you do a lot more without spending much, and you can find all kinds of services to help you to that end. For starters, you should make sure that you’re set up with a 24/7 answering service so that you never miss a potential tenant or opportunity. 

When you partner with a team like the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai, you’ll get that along with assistance for all kinds of communications and admin tasks. We can provide solutions for lead screening and intake, appointment scheduling, and even managing your live website chat. Plus, we’ll even help with outreach campaigns to bolster that list of leads in the first place. And it all comes with a custom strategy to ensure we manage every last detail.

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai. 

‍