Flow’s aim is to incentivise people to become better tenants, while making your rentals stand out from the competition.

Flow reduces fragmentation within the rental market through automation. It allows real estate agencies to automatically convert their listings into online ads that are served to a targeted audience across Facebook, Instagram and Google.Over 70% of global digital ad spend is spent on Facebook, Instagram and Google. South Africa’s property industry was missing out until proptech started revolutionising the rental market.

Digital marketing is the future of advertising. Online ad spend is experiencing double-digit growth and is predicted to surpass traditional offline marketing in 2020, according to The Adspend Outlook Report. Almost 70% of these online advertising dollars will be spent on the Google/Facebook ‘duopoly’.

The internet will remain the largest advertising platform. Not only because large portions of the global population are working from home, forgoing their daily commute, and will probably continue to do so on a permanent basis; but because the global lockdown has also seen a huge increase in the time we all spend online.

The property industry largely shied away from digital spend in favour of more traditional marketing strategies. The rise of proptech is seeing roadside billboards and radio jingles being replaced with targeted digital ads, which are curated to specific audiences using behavioural data. These digital ads offer advertisers high-quality and low-cost business leads, and are the fastest and easiest way to maximise your marketing budget.

Transitioning Online

E-commerce companies were the first to embrace online advertising due to the digital nature of their transactions. With time, businesses that were not traditionally digital natives, such as the motoring industry, began to drive their consumers online by adapting their sales funnel.

Buying a car is not a fragmented process, it has a low frequency transaction — similar to that of renting a place — and seldom ever happens online. However, at the point of sale, the motoring industry directs their clients to their websites to customise their cars. Here, they can choose their new car’s colour, customise the interior, opt-in for certain features and choose the mag wheels. This online process is an important signal of intent on the part of the consumer. The industry is using it as an opportunity to gain greater insights into their consumers for increased brand awareness and future online advertising leads.

Proptech is doing the same for the property industry.

Proptech Migrates Real Estate Online

If an industry is characterised by at least one of the following factors — non-fragmentation, high frequency of sale, and online transactions — it can easily channel its marketing spend online.

These factors are the reason why the property industry is taking longer to transition online when compared to other industries. Firstly, the property industry is fragmented by its very nature. Traditionally, the transaction of signing a lease agreement happens offline. And lastly, renting is a low frequency transaction that happens on average once a year.

The global rise of proptech — which is rapidly being adopted across South Africa and is being accelerated by the lockdown — is disrupting the property industry. It’s digitally transforming the rental market by seamlessly migrating it online for greater audience reach.

Go With The Flow

Flow is the proptech platform that’s spearheading South Africa’s rent revolution. It effortlessly mediates the relationship between landlords, agents and tenants through an easy-to-use website and app.

Flow’s aim is to incentivise people to become better tenants, while making your rentals stand out from the competition.

Flow reduces fragmentation within the rental market through automation. It allows real estate agencies to automatically convert their listings into online ads that are served to a targeted audience across Facebook, Instagram and Google.

Flow automatically takes your existing listing, turns it into an ad, and lets the Facebook algorithm optimise it.

Thanks to proptech, online ad creation and spend management is no longer a chore. Flow takes care of all of that for you. It delivers high-quality, pre-assessed leads straight to your phone. All that’s left for you to do is convert these leads into leases with the help of the instant messaging feature on our Flow app.

Every real estate agent understands the importance of striking while the iron is hot. And Pew Research shows that 64% of people prefer to message rather than call a business.

When you list your rentals with Flow, they are automatically packaged with deals and rewards that are unlocked by the tenant during their leases. Certain deals, like 50% off prepaid electricity and vouchers from top retailers, get unlocked when tenants pay their rent on time through the Flow app, provide feedback via their monthly home check-in, and renew their lease. By engaging tenants on a continuous basis, Flow increases the likelihood that they will be retained in the long term, and solves the low frequency nature of renting.

Package your listings to attract more tenants with unique deals only available on Flow.

Digital Marketing Is The Future And Offers A Higher ROI

It’s important to direct your advertising spend to the right audience, to reach them where they spend most of their time, so as to increase visibility, leverage customer targeting, and to make your marketing campaign more cost effective.

Facebook and Instagram boast 13.8 million highly active South African users that log into each platform at least once a week, according to the 2020 edition of the SA Social Media Landscape Report, released in June by World Wide Worx and Ornico.

The report shows that Facebook remains the social platform of choice for marketing, with 89% of major South African brands active on Facebook and 69% active on Instagram. Close to 60% of these major brands already spend most of their social media budget on Facebook because they find it to be the most effective social media platform in terms of their marketing strategy. This is followed by LinkedIn and Instagram.

A large proportion of Generation Rent — the 21–35 age group that chooses to rent rather than buy a property — spend a considerable amount of time on Facebook and Instagram for work and leisure. Proptech creates access to this niche market.

Book a demo to learn how Flow leverages its technology to maximise your social and Google ad spend to drive more leads and signed leases. Welcome to the future of renting!

Email us at info@flow.rent for more info about what’s coming next to Flow. Give us any ideas about how we can make Flow even better for our users.