Rethinking Your Apartment Website Design
Property management companies know that their apartment websites are one of their biggest assets when it comes to lead capture. A lot of multifamily websites look the exact same. Gallery photos of staged units and some property photos as well. Nothing about it is exciting or gives the prospect an idea of what life is like at your property or in that community. This is the state of apartment website design today.
When it comes to apartment web sites, taking inspiration from apartment therapy content on social media and multifamily blogs is a great place to start rethinking what the content on your website should look like. The multifamily world really hates the word “complex” and instead uses “community” when describing their apartments and properties. It’s understandable. The word complex is so sterile and feels bland and boring. Community on the other hand feels like it’s full of life, it’s a place someone would want to call home and live in for a few years.
The understanding of this is there in property management companies, and yet the websites read more complex than community. How can this be fixed? Let’s dive into a few ways to bring more life to your apartment website.
COMMUNITY CENTERED
The first thing that can be updated is the photos.While it’s important to have those stock like gallery photos of the units and property, including photos of people actually living in the units and property is a great way to bring life to your website.
Usually multifamily websites have a reel of photos playing on the main landing page. This is where some of the more lively photos should live while the staged ones should live just in the gallery portion of your website. Photos of resident events are also great to add through your landing page as well as photos of the community your property is located in.
This will make your website stand out to prospects because the majority of apartment website design looks like what we described above, complex-y. Taking a more community approach the photos and videos you display on your homepage will make your website more attractive and appealing to prospects.
SEO AND BLOGS
SEO strategy is critical to have. It’s how your apartment website gets ranked in search results organically. Investing time and effort in narrowing down what keywords prospects are using, like “apartments near me”, will help you add that kind of copy to your website. The more areas in which you can add your primary keywords, the easier it will be for search engines like Google to rank you higher up in search results.
The thing is, there usually isn’t a lot of copy on multifamily websites. That copy is also hard to add keywords into as well. Creating a blog that is specific to your property and local neighborhood is a fun way to create space to add copy that can contain all sorts of keywords while also centering your website as a go to for information on what to do in the neighborhood.
Apartment therapy content is a loved category by many and entering that space will help you keep prospects on your website longer and even attract prospects that might have not been able to find you before. There are so many things you can blog about including:
- Reviews of local businesses
- Recaps of local events
- Decorating and design tips for specific apartments
- Move in tips specific to your property
- How to request maintenance
- Recap of resident events
Keeping prospects on your website longer will help you capture more insightful data, if it’s designed to do this.
ENGAGE WITH AI
Leasing AI has really changed how lead capture and automation work. For starters, it has made it more efficient and with platforms like PERQ, there are complete solutions that can do the engaging, capture, automated nurture, real time reporting, and more. PERQ uses a natural language chatbot to answer prospect questions 24/7. It keeps the history of the chats and uses the information the prospect provided in it’s follow-up messaging and can understand if they are low or high intent.
PERQ only hands off high intent leads into the CRM that are ready to talk to the leasing team. No more crowded CRMs and time wasted trying to sift through all the bad leads to find the good leads. Leasing teams save time by only focusing on quality leads while PERQ takes care of the rest.
These three components — community centered, SEO and blogging, leasing AI — when combined together make for an apartment website that is designed to keep prospects engaged, gather information, and place your property as the go to place to live in the neighborhood.