Marketing your rental property plays an important role in the tenant you place and the income you earn. Today, we’re talking about how to market your property and what I do as a professional property manager in Santa Barbara.

Professional Pictures are Critical

Today, everything is online, just like when you’re selling a home. So it’s important to have high quality photography. If you do nothing else in your marketing except hire a professional photographer to take good pictures, you’re going to be ahead of the game. People are going to spend most of their time looking at pictures before they decide whether or not they want to see the home. The write up is important and needs to be short and detailed. There are certain key words and phrases you want to say so that all parameters of the property are covered. However, you want to keep it concise because the pictures are going to be more important.

Posting Your Ad

Once you have your ad written and some great pictures to go with it, you’ll need to decide where to place it. In Santa Barbara, everybody looks on Craigslist for rentals. That’s where most of the potential tenants can be found. The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is also a good place to list properties, and most real estate agents and property managers can put your property on MLS. Your listing also needs to be on the portals that people use when they’re searching for rentals. These are sites like Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Homes, and others. Be on all of those. You can do that through manually loading them onto the sites, or by syndicating them to those sites. I have outsourced that part of my marketing plan, so all of the listings we have at Lemon Tree Management show up on all the rental sites.

Remember to pay attention to your photography, and get as much exposure as possible for your rental listing. If you have any questions about this, or you’d like help marketing your Santa Barbara rental property, please contact us at Lemon Tree Management.