Direct Solicitation On Other Properties

Targeting other apartment communities with your Flyers and Door Hangers is just plain crass, in my opinion. I don’t understand why property management companies, even well-known companies with what appears to be a bottomless budget, continue to send their employees over to properties after hours to litter the neighboring property. 

Reasons to NOT ENGAGE in this type of “Marketing”:

1.      Hello? Ever pay attention to the posted NO SOLICITATION Signs? Your entire staff can be visited by local law enforcement and issued Orders of Banishment. Do you want to post bail for your Leasing Consultant who is arrested for trespassing?

2.      Safety – Nothing can ensure your safety. Attacks occur anywhere and do. Is sending your Leasing Consultant out to paper the neighboring comp worth THAT?

3.      Think this is great Guerrilla Marketing? Think again! It’s a nuisance and sets your community up to garner a BAD REPUTATION. At the comp you just crammed with litter, your apartment community is becoming known as DESPERATE.

Marketing Directors who feel this is the best use of their monetary resources and salary budget, should get out of apartment marketing then. I know – you stress that, even if you get only ONE NEW LEASE, it is worth it, I feel you are wrong. And if you, as a Marketing Director find out that one of your managers has sanctioned the use of this outdated, classless type of advertising, tell that Manager to just Cut.It.Out. Otherwise, attorneys out there will send you their lovely Cease and Desist letters and a bill for the time and trouble of paying someone to clean up the litter.

Can't You Read the NO SOLICITING Sign?

This happens frequently of late and I am beginning to wonder if people just cannot read, fail to notice or just plain choose to ignore our property’s No Soliciting/No Trespassing signage. Since the advent of the elimination of utility company billing monopolies, there has been every kind of so-called utility billing company sprouting up promising to lower your electric and gas bills if you will only allow them a copy of your bill for comparison sake roaming the property. And they show up every month, it seems. Not to mention all the AT&T U-Verse sales reps who converge on the property in packs of three. Never the same three, mind you, because I run them off each and every time I see them pounding the pavement. They are so obnoxious in their insistence that they can be here, that I resort to calling for police assistance to make them leave.

Now, I am dealing with a religious group busing in groups of ten and twelve slapping reading materials on doorknobs. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in witnessing to others and ordinarily I don’t mind reading pamphlets some religious affiliations leave. However, don’t the residents living in an apartment community on private property deserve, well, some privacy? I cannot decipher what religious group this is as their door hangers do not identify their affiliation, only, from what I can tell, the end is near according to Revelations.

There is a reason that there are No Soliciting and No Trespassing signs on private property. Residents who choose to live in a rental community do not need to be subjected to unwelcome interactions, and having complete strangers tramp up to one’s door, knock and try to sell something interferes with one’s expectation of quiet and peaceful enjoyment of one’s home. The main reason I dislike having these strangers on site, uninvited is because it can be scary to some Residents. Many elderly Residents are freaked out by this intrusion and they are also easy prey, in my opinion. I cannot tell you the number of times they have called me to ask, “Mindy, do I need to have AT&T instead of cable?” or, “Mindy, I switched to this company for my electric bill and now I got my bill and it’s $60 more than it was last month with DP&L! What should I do?”

It is frustrating to have so little control over this issue. After all, the very nature of our business is to welcome strangers to come for a visit. But it hasn’t gotten to the point now, that in this economy, we need to enact other measures to dissuade the door-to-door peddlers.