Build-to-Rent: It’s time to increase your marketing efforts

In a recent report from The Guardian, Build-to-Rent schemes haven’t come out with a huge amount of hope for 2018 growth.

The report highlighted the strong potential for house-building to rise in popularity this year, following 217,000 homes coming to the market in 2016-2017, up 20% on the previous year. There’s a strong likelihood of this subsequently diminishing the amount of people deciding to rent.

On top of this, they’ve stipulated that landlords will lose out to first-time buyers as buy-to-let lending falls – in recent years buy-to-let lending has fallen by up to 40,000.

So, with all of this in mind, it’s becoming more and more important to market your BtR scheme as effectively and thoughtfully as possible to have a long-lasting impact on your target audience.

Here are our top tips for accelerating your BtR marketing efforts.

Digital marketing

To really compete with these figures and entice renters to your BtR scheme you need to find the best way to target your potential buyers. The best way to do this? By casting your net as wide as possible.

Enter, paid social advertising.

Assuming you’ve already began construction on your development, you should have a good idea of your target audience – and perhaps even have customer personas. This information will tell you whether your audience falls into a high-wealth, luxury bracket or young professionals who want to rent for the first-time bracket.

Using your customer information, create a paid-for Facebook advertising campaign that targets exactly these types of people, using a pre-determined budget.

Chances are your advert will get a click rate that’s as low as 30p per click, meaning you’re attracting three potential customers to your website for less than £1.

Best of all, you can get estimated figures, including reach, click rate and cost per click, before you even launch the advert. If you don’t like the figures, you don’t have to run the ad.

For more information on social media advertising, visit our blog Social Media Advertising for your Property Sales Strategy.

Traditional PR and marketing

Depending on your target audience, a traditional marketing strategy may be just what the doctor ordered.

For example, if your audience is older couples who want to retire or downsize to an apartment, create press releases about your scheme and send them out to relevant publications that will be read by your target demographic.

A launch event would also get your scheme seen on a local and regional level. By inviting key figureheads of your city, coordinating some speakers and inviting the press, the official opening of your BtR scheme will be picked up by publications across your region which will help generate interest and new business.

It’s now or never

Reports may not be in favour of BtR schemes in 2018, however there are countless ways to beat the statistics and make your scheme shine!

We’ve just given you a brief overview of how you can accelerate your marketing efforts. If you need help with your BtR marketing efforts or would like to discuss other PR and marketing activities, get in touch with us at Roland Dransfield and we’ll be able to help you out.

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