MHP Marketing Madness
William Wrigley Jr. was the chewing gum magnate behind the Wrigley gum empire.
He also owned the Chicago Cubs (Wrigley Field) & Catalina Island off the coast of California.
Wrigley was a marketing genius, full stop.
He originally included sticks of gum in his baking soda product as a sales gimmick. Eventually, his customers just wanted the gum. So he pivoted and marketed the hell out of his double-mint gum. The rest is history.
During a recession Wrigley was asked why all other companies were slashing marketing expenses while he was INCREASING his advertising.
“I market for the same reason a pilot keeps his engines running once he is off the ground” - William Wrigley Jr.
Most mobile home parks should consistently market, even if they’re full.
You always want a waitlist - and especially an interested home buyer list. This might not make 100% financial sense in the short term, but man is it helpful when vacancies pop up.
This is true even if you’re in a great market.
Homes in some markets sell themselves, but ads sell them faster.
Instead of starting from zero or relying on a park manager (don’t hold your breath) or a marketing assistant to quickly post the ad, you can just email - or even better, text - your waitlist. This leads to quick sales.
But to advertise year round, you need a more generic ad that promotes the property (or perhaps a model home) vs. individual homes. You can then supplement that consistent ad with tactical ads for specific homes as they come available.
Our least favorite thing was jumping on Craigslist only to find our ad wasn’t showing. This creates a sickening feeling when you have vacancies to fill. We tried just about everything to speed up this process and keep the team accountable for getting specific ads posted timely. We never truly solved it.
Humans make errors, go on vacations and fumble on the goal line. Plus craigslist randomly ghosts ads. It’s an uphill battle.
It would get so infuriating at times, I even tried posting one off ads myself, which was 100% not a great use of my time.
That’s why we just switched to 100% generic advertising with supplemental ads for specific homes. Right or wrong, we wanted a system vs. trusting the team to jump on posting ads ah hoc.
At a minimum this ensured we had a steady stream of interested tenants inquiring about the park.
I think this works in mobile home park world because, frankly (unless it’s a beautiful new double wide with a porch and serious interior upgrades), we’re not selling Ferraris here.
You really just need to let the market to know you have nice, affordable homes in a safe, clean community.
To circle back to the Gum Guy (Wrigley):
“Any bozo can make gum, the trick is SELLING it.”
Ok…I added the “bozo” for effect. But I think you get the point.
MHP Marketing
It’s easy to view marketing as a necessary evil. Frankly it’s not that fun or cheap.
It can be tear-jerking to dish out cash when it doesn’t immediately translate into higher occupancy or rent growth.
Thankfully, reaching potentials tenants these days is easier and more effective than ever.
According to Broadband Search - adults spend an estimated 2 hours 27 minutes browsing social media each day.
Honestly that seems low for our tenant base. Pretty sure average MHP tenants are crushing those numbers.
10 years ago Craigslist was the 800 pound gorilla for marketing homes. It still works but it’s more time consuming, less effective and no fun running craigslist ads these days.
Facebook Marketplace is the new go-to resource for finding tenants. In the best markets you can post a home for rent & within minutes your manager will start receiving inbound calls.
For higher priced new homes it often pays to ‘boost’ the listing with some ad spend behind it.And with marketing, you don’t need to be clever, you just need to do the fundamentals well:
A lot of great pictures
Transparent pricing (include all likely expenses - lot rent, home rent, avg. utility pass throughs, etc.)
But if your market isn’t on fire for affordable housing you might need to get fancy. To narrow in on your buyer profile, you can track home buyers & inundate them with ads that follow them around as they surf the web.
This is called re-targeting and uses a facebook pixel (basically a cookie) to stalk your potential homebuyer (with your ads) as they visit other websites.
Use the Phone
By far and away the best thing you can do to increase mobile home sales + rentals is to pick up the phone.
Yet so many managers don’t want to do this.
This is maddening. Sometimes home sale or rental bonuses will get them to pick up the phone. Sometimes nothing will. As a solution you can hire an answering service to just take caller info and notify your team of hot leads via email. Or if you the portfolio is large enough, an inside sales person or team should be responsible for inbound and outbound calling.
At scale, use some lightweight CRM + email software to track home sale leads and schedule automated email campaigns.
Hire the Professional
If you have a whole slew of homes to sell you might want to consider hiring a professional marketing firm.
Pro marketing crews do this stuff day in & day out. They’ll optimize your ad campaigns and help you spend less time updating Facebook ads.
It’s not cheap, but we’ve more than once swallowed our pride and hired the pros after trying to setup & run marketing campaign ourselves.
At the very least, pay the premium to get a system setup professionally.
Miscellaneous Marketing Tactics:
Contests / referral bonuses - have your manager pass around a flyer with a $500 bonus for any signed lease or $2,000 for any home sale lead. Free trips to a nearby vacation spot also work well & tend to add disproportionate amount of engagement to the referral program vs. cold hard cash.
Flyer - Pay a teenager $100 bucks to flyer a WalMart parking lot. You might get a few angry calls - and no idea if this is legal in your city - but it always felt like a low risk proposition to us.
TV ads - believe it or not, but local TV ads are getting CHEAP. A lot of people cutting the cord to Netflix has caused local TV ad rates to dip. This probably only makes sense for expensive home sales & big infill projects - trying to lease one 1980 singlewide for $3K wouldn’t be smart for this channel.
Social Media - create a property instagram account and hire an overseas social media manager to post about your new homes EVERY DAY - not every week - until they are sold.
Return on Marketing Spend
This might seem like a lot. But do the math on what you gain by selling a home. Why? Because it should help you back into the advertising dollars worth spending to close one home.
For example: If your lot rent is $500 and an incremental home isn’t going to add much in expenses, than that home adds an additional $100,000 in value to the park at a 6% cap rate.
And yet, I’ve seen countless MHP profit and loss statements with substantial vacancy that have ZERO in advertising and marketing spend.
Be sure to add in some staffing costs for marketing, all advertising costs, and bonuses, etc. to come up with your own CAC (customer acquisition cost). You can’t just use ad spend as that’s not the true all-in cost to sell a home.
If you need some room to make the math work, add a reasonable mark-up to the home to help offset home sale commissions + ad costs.
The Main Point to Marketing Homes:
Happy Trails,
MHP WEEKLY