Morgul Marketing

    The pages an Austin owner reads before deciding to call you

    A property management website serves an audience that wants nothing to do with each other. Tenants come for the portal and the maintenance form. Applicants come to check requirements. Owners, who pay for everything, come once, read for eleven minutes and decide. Most sites in this trade are built for the tenants because tenants generate the traffic, and the owner is left with a stock photo of a skyline and a contact form. Build for the owner first, keep the tenant traffic fast and out of the way, and make the site prove you run properties in this specific metro rather than somewhere generic.

    Talk to us

    Owners want a rent range before they want a company

    The offer in the first screen should be the number the owner came for, not an introduction to your firm.

    An owner deciding whether to rent out a house is running arithmetic. Mortgage, taxes, insurance, a management fee, some vacancy. The missing input is the rent, and until they have it, nothing you say about your team matters.

    Put a rent range request where the hero image usually sits. Name the counties you take beside it so nobody fills it in from a town you do not serve.

    State what they get and when. A written range with the comparable leases behind it, delivered on a stated schedule, is a real offer. A promise that someone will be in touch is not.

    Keep the form to what you need to produce the range. Address, property type, bedrooms, whether it is occupied, and one way to reach them.

    Ask what work the owner expects before move-in, not just the bed count

    The turn scope is the part of the deal that goes wrong, and the form is your first chance to find out what the owner has in mind.

    Add a field for planned work before the first tenant. Paint, flooring, fencing, landscaping, tree work, a new patio or an added parking space. The answers sort your pipeline better than any other question on the page.

    Some of those answers change the timeline. Improvements that touch trees or add hard surface can trigger a city review step, and rules here are unusually strict and vary by lot. Say on the page that it is worth confirming with the city before design work.

    Also ask who currently holds the keys, whether a tenant is in place, and when the current lease ends. A property with a sitting tenant is a different onboarding entirely.

    Every field costs you completions, so cut something else to pay for these. Job title, how they heard about you and the message box can all go.

    Show a Hyde Park bungalow and a Leander build on the same page

    Photography is where an owner decides whether you actually work in their part of the metro.

    The housing you manage has no visual consistency. A 1930s bungalow near Hyde Park, a sloped lot off Barton Creek with a long drive, a two year old build in Leander or Kyle, a duplex in East Austin. Show all of it.

    One downtown skyline photo tells an owner you are a franchise with a call center, which is precisely the thing a newcomer is trying to avoid picking by accident.

    Real photographs of properties you manage, used with permission and without addresses or tenant details, do more work than any adjective on the page. Older stock is worse than fewer images.

    Caption them with what you do there, not what the house is worth. Turn work, inspection cadence, the kind of vendor who covers that area.

    Build the speed budget for a phone with two bars outside Dripping Springs

    Your slowest visitors are on weak signal in the parts of the metro where your maintenance calls originate.

    Coverage in the Hill Country and on the edges of Hays and Williamson counties is uneven. A page that renders in two seconds on office fiber can take a great deal longer on a phone parked in a driveway.

    The usual offenders in this trade are a map embed, a chat widget, a review carousel and a listing grid loading full resolution photos. Cut them in that order and measure after each one.

    Test on a throttled connection rather than on your laptop. The maintenance form and the owner inquiry form are the two pages that must survive the worst network in your service area.

    Speed is also a leasing feature. A renter comparing four addresses while sitting in traffic on MoPac gives your listing page a couple of seconds at most.

    Portal traffic is not website traffic, and mixing them hides both

    Tenant sessions swamp owner sessions, so keep them structurally separate or you will never see the numbers that matter.

    Most management software hosts the portal on its own subdomain, which is fine. What breaks is analytics: portal logins and maintenance submissions counted alongside owner visits make every metric on your marketing site meaningless.

    Separate the properties or filter the traffic, and set a distinct conversion for the owner inquiry, the rent range request and the booked call. Tenant actions get tracked at zero value.

    Put the portal login where a tenant can find it in one look, usually the top right of every page. Hiding it in a footer generates phone calls that a staff member has to answer.

    Then check your own numbers monthly by audience. Owner sessions will be a small fraction of the total, and every design decision on the marketing pages should be judged against that fraction.

    Replace the adjectives with your inspection schedule and your vendor bench

    Owners are comparing operations, and nobody has ever chosen a manager because a website called the firm dedicated.

    Write down what actually happens. How often a property is inspected and what the report contains. Who takes an after hours call and what the escalation looks like. How maintenance is approved and at what threshold you call the owner first.

    Name the vendor coverage by area. An owner in Georgetown wants to know you have someone north, and an owner off Barton Creek wants to know somebody will make it up the drive.

    Publish a sample owner statement and the schedule you send it on. A single screenshot of a real statement outperforms a page of promises.

    Keep the claims defensible. Describe your process, avoid guaranteeing any outcome, and route legal, insurance and code questions to the appropriate professional in plain language on the page.

    Questions we get

    Do we need a new site or can we fix the one we have?
    Start by measuring rather than rebuilding. If the current site is fast, indexed and structured sensibly, a new owner path, a rent range offer and better photography can be added to it. A rebuild is warranted when the platform makes speed impossible or you cannot add pages without a developer.
    Should the tenant portal live on our own domain?
    Whatever your management software supports is usually fine, and most host it on a subdomain. The important part is that the login is visible from every page and that portal traffic is kept out of the analytics you use to judge your marketing pages.
    How fast does the site actually need to be?
    Fast enough on a mid range phone on a weak connection, which is a stricter test than any score. Load your own maintenance form on a phone in the far edge of your service area and see what happens. That experience, not a lab number, is what your tenants and owners get.
    Should listings be on the homepage?
    Generally no. Listings are the heaviest content on the site, they change constantly, and the owner you are trying to win does not scroll them. Give them a well built section of their own and keep the homepage focused on the owner decision.
    Is stock photography ever acceptable?
    For texture, occasionally. For anything claiming to represent your work, no. A downtown skyline photograph signals a national brand, and in a market full of newcomers trying to find a local firm, that is the opposite of what your best prospect is looking for.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

    Talk to us about web design for property management companies in Austin

    Tell us about your business and where your marketing stands. We'll tell you what we'd do first, and what we'd leave alone.

    We won't add you to a mailing list. A person will reply.