“There’s a finite number of eyeballs out there, so obviously, we watch any new competitor coming into the market,” says Peggy Abkemeier-Alford, president of Santa Monica, Calif.–based ILS Rent.com. “The [RENTCafé] website looks great, but we have been iterating on our product offering for 10 years, and that ongoing process is hard. It can also be difficult to get renter traffic, and that is what you really need.” Recent product iterations at Rent.com have included what Abkemeier-Alford calls nuts-and-bolts refinement to search optimization as well as efforts to improve and expand the ILS’s inventory mix while also continuing to reach out directly to prospects via an e-mail marketing program. “We’re continuing to figure out how to get renters engaged and improve the stickiness on our site but also gather the right eyeballs that are going to convert,” says Abkemeier-Alford. “Anything we can do to get the renters more engaged and staying on our site looking for properties is good for our customers.”
This challenge of capturing audience in a fragmented space isn’t exclusive to vendor offerings. Multifamily owners and operators struggle with marketing fragmentation as well, particularly in the use of social media to connect with existing and prospective renters. Everyone, it seems, is struggling with whether there is a true impact to the bottom line from online engagement activity—and whether consumers even want to have a social media relationship with their housing provider (see “Social Status”).
