When you are a real estate investor, you need to ensure that your property is not sitting vacant for long periods of time. Once you have confirmed that current tenants are leaving, you should be 100% focused on advertising the property. But, advertising doesn’t always have to mean paid listings. If you have been smart about building a community online, you can share your listing on social media and get renters quickly without spending any additional money.
At Regalway Homes, we’ve spent years building up and monitoring our presence on social media. As part of our services, we offer coaching for new investors and can help you understand whether you’ll need a presence on social media. That being said, social media includes so many sites that the maintenance of all of your profiles can become a full-time job. So, let’s look at which sites are the best for reaching renters.
Before we start though, it’s important that you have a landing page to collect contact information from the potential renters. That could be on your website or on a third-party site like Realtor.com, but make sure there is one place where you will send everybody.
Now, on to the social media sites…
LinkedIn is a business networking site. This is not normally a place to see rental properties. That being said, your higher net worth clientele is most likely to be reachable here. An added benefit of using LinkedIn is that the competition is low. As I mentioned, there are not a lot of realtors utilizing the platform.
A couple of things to help you stand out on LinkedIn:
Set up a company page if you are representing a company. This provides you with credibility, but you should do the majority of your promotion as yourself. So, make sure your own profile is clean, complete, and professional.
Take the images you have of your property and turn them into pdfs. Share them in LinkedIn posts by attaching them to your post. This type of post gets a lot of views.
Instagram is a very visual platform, so it’s good for realtors. The average age for users on this platform is 25 to 34 years old. Unfortunately, the competition is very high, so it’s harder to stand out. Recently, Instagram has upped their video game, so whenever possible, use their reels feature to create videos of properties, the neighbourhood, and even individual features of the property.
A couple of things to help you stand out on Instagram:
Always tag your posts with the location of the property. It’ll be much faster to get a rental agreement signed if the new tenant is local, so reach the people searching for the location by tagging your photos this way.
Try tagging other local businesses to piggyback on their following. So, if there’s a super popular Asian market down the street, take photos there and mention how close your property is while also tagging the Asian market’s account. Now, you are reaching their audience.
Facebook has changed a lot lately. The typical audience is a little older than on Instagram (40.5 years old average on Facebook), so that’s important to keep in mind when considering who might rent your property. Another thing about Facebook is that it is challenging to get in front of people that are not connected or following you. So, Facebook would be good if you already have a good following and a lot of connections here. If you are new to the platform or haven’t used it for work, it might be better to look at Instagram.
Tik Tok
Roughly 50% of TikTok’s global audience is under 34, with 32.5% aged between 10 and 19. (Omnicoreagency.com) This makes a big difference as there are fewer earners in this crowd and, therefore less potential renters. Like LinkedIn, there is a benefit to reaching a crowd with less competition, but there are other issues we see with Tik Tok as well. Tik Tok is a video platform, so you will need to record multiple videos of the property and keep up with the site’s trends in order to reach a reasonable audience. The amount of time needed to make these videos might not pay off in the long run. We would again recommend Instagram over Tik Tok.
Twitter is another of the leading social platforms. Twitter is a rolling feed, meaning your post will appear in the feed of people looking at the exact time of posting. Similar to Facebook, if you already have a good following, Twitter is a great platform to use for posting your property. If not, you will need to spend a considerable amount of time building a following and keeping up with your network.
At Regalway Homes, we help real estate investors to find properties that suit their portfolio goals. As part of our service, we can coach you on locations that make renting easy, so there will be less need to spend valuable time and money on advertising your property. If you would like to know more about our services, get in touch today!