With 2021 just around the corner, you’re likely thinking about your residents’ plans for the new year — specifically, are they planning to move?

Along with going to the gym regularly and forming better communication with long-distance friends, moving to a new apartment is often one of the changes renters decide they want to make in the new year. 

While it’s not possible to keep a resident forever and there are many circumstances where a resident has to move, there are many opportunities to save leases. Sometimes it can be such a small reason a resident decides to move, and with your efforts, you can eliminate it.

Here are a few highly-targeted marketing tactics to re-engage residents and encourage them to renew their lease with your property:

Utilize Residents’ New Year’s Resolutions

It’s a safe bet that many of your residents’ New Year’s resolutions surround health, money, and relationships. In fact, 50% of Americans stated exercising more was a New Year’s resolution in 2020. As well — saving money (49%), eating healthy (43%), and losing weight (37%).

Knowing this, you can lean into it and utilize it in your apartment marketing strategy.

For example, you can increase the marketing of your on-site gym or fitness center. You can show your residents how they can meet their new fitness goals at your property. Here are a few ideas to help get their attention:

• Offer complimentary training or group classes
• Create downloadable individual exercises or an exercise plan that can be completed with the equipment available in your gym
• Improve your fitness center with new equipment or a redesign
• Launch a property-wide fitness challenge for the month of January or the next three months where the winner receives a prize 

Whichever tactic you go with, make sure to market and promote it everywhere; share it on all of your property’s social platforms, include it in your weekly emails or newsletter, tack flyers on your resident’s doors, talk about it in the front office, etc. 

An additional idea, to match your residents’ health goals when it comes to diet, you can regularly share easy and healthy recipes that residents can make in their kitchen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can also offer healthy snacks in the leasing office or other resident amenities. 

If you feel like your residents may have different or more unique resolutions, send out a survey! To make it enticing, offer a $10 Starbucks gift card, or something similar, for everyone who participates. 

Become More Personal in Weekly Emails

If you don’t currently do a weekly email or some type of regular newsletter, that’s the first step for your New Year apartment marketing success.

Residents need to regularly hear from you. Even if they don’t open every email, they’ll see the property name in their inbox and know that their community is making the effort to communicate and update residents with news and information. 

If you already utilize emails, then it’s time to become more personal; break through the formal barrier and communicate with residents like they are your friends. If your property is small, you may even be able to slightly personalize the emails for each resident.

Here are some things you can include in your emails or newsletter: 

• Straight-forward questions (Are they happy with their home? Has maintenance been on time? Is the staff friendly? Are they considering moving?)
• Entertainment recommendations (Books, Movies, Shows, Podcasts, etc.)
• Quotes or phrases your team has connected with
• Fun personal stories from members of your team or residents
• Memes
• Easy apartment DIYs you know residents can complete in their homes without worrying about incurring damage fees.
  
  

This is why I love weekly emails, it’s an apartment marketing tactic that is open to so many ideas and you have full control over how bold or personal you want it to be.

The main goal is to help make residents feel like they are a true part of the community and that the property is excited about having them as a resident.