Years ago, I wrote about the idea of being proactive about addressing your competition on your own website.  In other words, actually list out local comps somewhere on your site.  I’ll admit I got a lot of incredulous looks, questioning why I would ever suggest that an apartment community would list a competitor on their own website – Why would we ever give them free publicity?  The prospect is on our website, do we really want them to see our competition?

Years later, I still think it’s a great idea.

Let me break it down:  Your prospects are already aware of your competition, or they will be within a few clicks.  They are loaded with more information than ever, so the idea that we are giving them free exposure just doesn’t hold water.  What we are doing is controlling the story.  If someone is searching for properties, their view of the market is often dictated by the ILS’s or Google itself, so a property has very little control about how they are positioned relative to its comps. 

However, if a community is able to get prospects to its website, now that community controls the story.  They can position themselves in any way they want relative to their competition.  Now, to be clear, I’m not advocating being dishonest in how one portrays the competition, but there are loads of ways to showcase competition honestly and ethically, while still gaining a competitive advantage.  One way is being selective in what to feature.  For example, let’s say you have 6 properties in your area, with one property being especially strong as a competitor.  It might make sense to feature the other five, giving prospects a pretty full view of the different locations in that area, but leaving out the one that happens to give you the most fits.

Again, I think it’s important to be ethical in this process, just like you would in the sales process.  You  wouldn’t lie to prospects if they asked about the property across the street, but you also may not talk about their killer feature, either. 

I got back on this idea because we were looking at podcasting/video solutions, and when I typed in “Riverside.fm versus”, hoping to get a list of comparable services, the top result actually came from Riverside.fm!   

For some percentage of shoppers, they will use this page as the foundation for the rest of their research.  They may take the list and dig into each service further, but they may not realize that one other great alternative isn’t even listed.  Plus, if you look at that page, you will see that every single feature is checked off by Riverside.fm, but surely there must be other features that the competition has that Riverside.fm doesn’t.  And yet, those features are just completely missing!  So in this way, Riverside.fm features their top benefits and limits awareness of their deficiencies.  Again, this is where honesty comes in to play.  If the approach is dishonest, prospects will sniff it out and you will actually lose trust.

As I prepared this post, I did a quick poll in the Multifamily ShareSpace to see if companies were already trying this out.  Looks like this is not on their radar.

This idea is probably not for everyone, but I would be excited to see if any decide to try it out.

Update:  I was thinking about what information would make sense to include, and I wonder if adding certain ratings would make sense.  For example, if a property had a 3 star average on Google, maybe include that.  That also might bring additional credibility as it leverages external trusted locations.  What other pieces of information would be valuable in this type of format?