Despite the turbulent times we live, there is a constant amount of movement in real estate and vacation rental properties. Real estate investors and home buyers continue searching out deals to invest in. Meanwhile villa-vacation rental owners have seen a marked increase in demand for their exclusive properties as vacation goers eschew hotels in favor of properties that offer privacy and safety benefits away from the masses.
We’ve worked with dozens of property owners to help prepare their homes for vacation rentals or sale, either independently or in collaboration with real estate agencies or vacation rental specialists.
Regardless of whether you are selling or renting you property, there are some essential things to consider in order to make your property more attractive to your target audience:
Value versus price
Everyone likes a bargain irrespective of the price of the property. Ensure that you effectively identify the value offer of your property to make the price seem secondary. How can you do this? By developing a brand narrative.
Brand your property
Branding is key to differentiating your property amongst a sea of competition. An attractive logo, carefully defined key messages and a compelling brand narrative will help seduce both buyers and renters. The key to property promotion is the ability to make your customer imagen themselves enjoying – whether living or vacationing – your home or villa. A great story that tells your history and highlights the property’s features will entice prospects to get in touch.
Build a professional website
OTAs, like Expedia or Travelocity, and real estate agents’ websites will naturally attract more traffic than your real estate or rental website unless you are prepared to spend millions, so this is definitely not about competing with established brands. However, designing a an attractive, mobile friendly website can complement the information on your partner websites by allowing you to customize and optimize your information and provide another touch point for those seeking properties like yours.
Optimize your property headlines & descriptions for maximum conversions
Be succinct, be concise and be effective in your headlines and descriptions. While it’s tempting to drown your content with poetic adjectives, your customer is more interested in fact than fiction. Avoid romance and promote your features and amenities efficiently.
Pictures and video are the soul of your campaign
The dominance of Instagram for promoting both vacation rentals and properties for sale are a testament to the power of videos and photographs when promoting properties. Video and photography can convey instantly what even the most skilled wordsmith may have a difficult time describing. While the best photographers and videographers are admittedly expensive, the outlay of cash should be looked on as an investment and not an expensive. A good photograph will get information requests from prospects jamming up your in-box in no time.
Invest in advertising
It takes money to make money and it takes a lot of eyeballs to get a click on a digital ad. Methodical advertising, done right, can increase your reach tenfold and increase the interactions with your website or social media. The relationship is direct: the more you invest in advertising the greater your marketing reach.
Social Media
Social media is an amazing tool to help you extend the reach and impact of your promotional effort. It allows you to promote not only the property features, but the local community where the property is located, celebrate the lifestyle on offer and publish customer reviews that will attract buyers. You do not have to post daily or hire an agency to do it well (though that will certainly help.) What you´ll definitely need is a great story, authentic and engaging content and the time to respond to and interact with your growing community of followers and prospects.
Professionalize your process
And finally, whether you are selling or renting your property, it’s important to consider the customer experience from the moment your prospect lands on your website, social media profile or dials your toll-free number. While a pretty design and great images will help generate conversions, implementing a professional response to their inquiry – whether it be a booking engine, a property-showing request calendar, an automated response to your email inquiries or implementing a CRM to manage the deluge of requests you´ll receive – you want to inspire confidence. You´ve made the effort and investment to get them to get in touch, do not scare them away being coming across as amateur now.
At the end of the day, a sale demands that your product or villa meets your customers’ needs. Following our simple guide above will make it more likely that your target audience invests the time to evaluate your offer and gets in touch, rather than moving along to the next property on the Google search result.
Click on the links below to see a few of the real estate branding and website projects we’ve recently developed:
At Mijo! Brands, a leading creative agency in digital marketing, with a presence in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta, we have a team of multidisciplinary professionals, specialists in creating digital marketing strategies and successful brand launches who will know how to prepare presentations to revolutionize your brand.
Daniel Gómez is Brand Strategist and Director of Mijo! Brands in Mexico City. In 2007, he received his MBA from the LSBU in London, England where he specialized in innovation. That same year, Daniel returned to Mexico to put into practice what he learned abroad in combination with his love for Mexico to create a new model of creative digital agency. He highlights his ability to maintain a wide frame of vision to connect different phases of any process and deliver innovative solutions for brands in multiple sectors. Passionate about travel and food, he understands that changing your environment from time to time gives you another set of eyes and widens your senses to pick up subtle differences, which is the key to uniqueness. His free time is split between being spent with his boxer, “Sofi”, and training to finish the CDMX marathon in less than 4.5 hours.
