Attention: All Associates

As you know, Marketing has been working on transferring our ILS advertising from Zillow to Apartments.com and would like to provide an update for onsite teams.

How many communities have been moved over?
Since February 1, all communities requiring ILS advertising are up on Apartments.com. This is currently 220 communities. We can add or subtract from this list and switch communities in and out at any time.

We are also continuing our move away from Zillow. As of March 9, we have reduced the number of communities to 66. We will continue to have a minimum overlap of 60+ communities on both Zillow and Apartments.com for a trial period of three months. We can also switch communities in and out of the Zillow list any time.

What are the results so far?
Apartments.com sends better qualified traffic to communities. This means that you may see less traffic from Apartments.com than Zillow, but the prospects you do receive will convert to leases better, and there will not be a reduction in leases sourced from the ILS. In this case, you will spend less time on the no-show appointments and unqualified prospect visits. The February data supports this pattern.

In our research, prospects typically use more than one ad source in their search behavior. We expect prospects who would have used Zillow will also show up in several other ad sources in addition to Apartments.com, such as Community Website.

Why Apartments.com?
In an earlier Buzz News article and E-Hour, we provided many reasons for why we are making this move.

As a reminder, Apartments.com has very similar reach and targets the same users as Zillow. In addition, it is a superior product, displays key information such as Specials, is a more responsive partner and costs less than Zillow. Marketing is closely monitoring on traffic and leases from all relevant online ad sources to ensure this ILS move is for the better of our business.

Questions?
If you have questions or concerns, please contact us at Marketing@essex.com.