Property Manager Case Study: Gaining Trust With Your Website

The following is a guest post provided by Dave Dugdale, owner/operator of RentVine.com and PickRent.com.   I have been following Dave's blog for several years .  Thanks for the contribution Dave, and welcome to the Let's Talk Property Management community.

Case Study of Gaining Trust with Your Web Site

I thought I would share a quick case study on how you can effectively gain trust for your online visitors.

For some time now, I have been doing many short video interviews with Marc Cunningham of Grace Management. Each video is pretty simple and includes just one question about property management. On one of my recent video shoots, Marc told me an interesting story of how one of his older videos locked in a client when he was just about to lose him.

Marc told me of a student that wanted to rent one of his managed properties. Marc told the student that he needed his dad to co-sign on the lease. The out-of-state dad called and left a message for Marc indicating that he was not comfortable providing his social security number with a management company he didn't know. The dad was pretty adamant about not providing the required information.

A day later Marc received a call from the dad and proceeds to tell Marc that he had visited Marc's company web site and watched the video of Marc on rental scams (Marc describes how to avoid scams in the video) and the dad said he was not hesitant any longer and was going to provide the info Marc
required. The dad said he felt safe with a person so knowledgeable on rental scams.

How to Unmask Rental Scammers

Conveying trust on your property management site is not that hard to do. Marc's video provides rich information to his visitors without a sales pitch. A picture or an informational video of your staff can go a long way to helping you convert visitors into customers.

Dave Dugdale has been in the online rental advertising business for 5 years and is the owner/operator of RentVine.com and PickRent.com. He was the first to write a blog on the rental ad industry, and the first to podcast interviews of industry experts in property management. He has also produced many video interviews that are available on ITunes. Dave has also been leading the way in better detection of rental scams by sharing his database of blacklist email addresses with competitors.