Home Selling Tips: Flyers Sell Houses

I found myself in the interesting position of having SEVEN vacant rental properties (ouch!). The typical newspaper ads were not pulling enough calls, any many of the callers were Section 8 tenants! Nauseous at the though of forking out another $4,500 on vacant properties next month, I decided to pull out an old, but under–utilized technique… the paper flyer. I made hundreds of flyers on my computer in various colors. I included a map with directions on the flyer . I had them distributed on car windshields in every shopping mall, supermarket and church parking lot within a mile radius of the rentals.

The United States Supreme Court says it’s free speech protected by the First Amendment! Bottom line: every tenant to whom I ended up renting came from a flyer! We all know that you cannot advertise for families, because it is discriminatory against single people. We also know that a family with kids is less likely to break a lease early than a single person.

The bottom line is, if you place your flyers in places that families visit, your chances of finding a family to rent are increased. Rather than a blind ad in the newspaper, put flyers on windshields of cars parked at Restaurants Place flyers in church parking lots, schools and Toys ’R Us. The law says you can’t STATE who you want as a tenant in your flyer, but it doesn’t prohibit where you distribute the flyers! Now you are marketing to a family crowd.