Is Your Park Secretly Making Your Guests And Tenants Feel Like They Aren’t Getting Their Money’s Worth?

Hi, I’m Jason Ayers and in this video we’re going to talk about another big revenue killer and that is first impressions.

So when somebody drives into your park, they get a first impression of your park and then shortly thereafter they usually, unless they’re doing an overnight check-in or something like that, they’re usually going to have an interaction with your staff, with your park manager and anybody else that works for your park or your resort.

So what I want to talk about today is a big killer of your reputation and that’s deferred maintenance.

Deferred maintenance really causes somebody to feel like the park is not being well taken care of.

They have this expectation that if they’re going to give you their money that you’re going to take care of things. You’re going to take care of them. And that’s, you know, in a way that’s part of the renter mentality, right? If I own a house, I expect to take care of this house. But if I’m renting, I expect the landlord to take care of it for me.

So why does this matter? Well, it matters because we’re talking overall in this series about bad online reviews and what you can do to prevent them and to get positive online reviews because if somebody is coming into your area and they have the choice between your park. And a park that has let’s say there’s one of these is your park one has two star review average one has a four star review average, Well obviously we want your park to be this park because people are gonna have a bias and a tendency to go to that park why else is it important well if you’re going to pay a premium or if you’re going to pay at the high end of the market in terms of rental rate.

So let’s just make up some numbers here. Let’s say $430 is the average in your area and you want to charge $460 per month for an RV space, then you need to give them a premium product. They need to feel like, hey, we’re paying more, but we’re getting more. A lot of this is about subconscious give and take in the person’s mind.

So why am I qualified to talk about this? Why are we talking about this?

Well, my name is Jason Ayers. I have a company called Send More Leads where we do RV park, RV resort and mobile home park marketing. And I grew up in the mobile home and RV park. I’ve done pretty much every job function that you can imagine. At one point we had five parks and one apartment complex. And what I chose to focus on is marketing.

How do you attract great tenants to your park and how do you get them to rent from you and to stay with you as long as possible and to have a really good experience so they end up giving you these high reviews, these positive reviews.

So when I’m working with owners, a lot of times the owners are out of state or at least they’re out of the city, right? They’re not geographically located where their park or resort is, especially if they own multiple parks and resorts.

So what can you do about this? Well, one thing you can do and what I advise in Mobile Home Park Classroom, which is a complete end-to-end training program for property owners and park managers that I created, is to have a checklist because most of the owners I represent, I don’t want to represent an owner, for example, that doesn’t take care of his or her park.

I want to represent people that are creating a great customer experience for people, and that know that they need to invest some amount of their revenue back into the park to take care of it, and they want to do the best job possible.

So most of the people that I work with, If there’s deferred maintenance, they’ll take care of it, but they can’t take care of the deferred maintenance they don’t know about.

So how do we solve that problem? Well, one way to do that is to have checklists. And there are a number of them inside Mobile Home Park Classroom. And that checklist is something that either your park manager, or let’s say a member of your maintenance staff, is gonna use on a regular basis, right?

So you establish some frequency for them to go through your park and to take care of this checklist. And they’re just going to note in very important areas if anything needs to be taken care of. And in terms of deferred maintenance, I would include not just things that need to be fixed or repaired like physical things, but also landscaping, you know, architectural lighting, signage, trash in the park, trash in any of the yards, right, or in any of the lots or spaces.

We really want to make sure that the park looks as good as it can possibly look so they get that first and that great first impression when they come in.

So you need frequency, but you need a feedback loop because how do you know whether or not it’s being done? you can have them scan it and email it to you. Or you can create an online form, for example, that they fill out.

So they can scan it and email it to you. And that introduces the problem of how do you know that that report is accurate? And how do you know it’s being taken care of?

Well that brings us to the next point, which is periodic spot checks. And this is where you, as the owner, or one of your representatives, drops in unannounced to take a look at the park. And they bring a checklist with them and they drive around and they walk around and they make sure that everything is being taken care of.

And by doing this, you essentially end up with a system that’s going to make sure that you don’t have any deferred maintenance so that instead you end up with positive reviews.

Those positive reviews plus a park that looks great is going to allow you to command premium pricing.

So these two things together means that you get more tenants.

More revenue.

Well what can you do with more revenue?

You can reinvest in your park.

You can take care of any deferred maintenance.

You can make improvements.

things that create an even better first impression and customer experience.

So I hope that’s helped you to get an idea of what you can do to make a great first impression.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Mobile Home Park Classroom or about our marketing services and how we can help you convert more people into tenants so that you can make more revenue, just click one of the links below this video or on the side of this video.

Thank you.