Kane,

We have ranked two apartment complexes in local search using the same domain.  So I do agree, separate websites may not help local search unless Google limits the same domain from ranking more than 2-3 times.

Ranking organically is very hard to do beyond the 9th or 10th position for key words like "apartments in Forest Lake".  Big players like Apartments.com and Zillow have really concurred that space.  There are some long tail keywords like "luxury apartments in Forest Lake" that we could link for.

Having all the apartments on one site would help the domain authority of that site because the backlinks are not spread out.  This may help us reach position 8 instead of 10.  Splitting the site up would allow us to capture spots 10-20.

As I write this, it seems that capturing spot 8 is better than capturing spots 10-20.  What are your thoughts?  Are my assumptions even accurate?

Miriam,

Thank you!  Yes, I do mean apartment complexes (e.g. Blue Apartment Community).  I am not proposing creating different sites for each unit (e.g. APT #203).

What's your opinion on this topic?

That's a good point.  If we did the multisite option we would still have a way to see all the properties from the corporate site.

We are running into one key issue with one site instead of many.  That problem is that our site only shows up once in the search results for searches like "apartments in Forest Lake".  But we have about a dozen properties in that city.  It's my understanding that if we had separate sites then we could show up multiple times, once for each property.

Is that true, and is it worth the hassle to do that?

Kane,

Thank you for your response!  Here are the answers to your clarifying questions:

Are any of the communities near each other, or are they in many cities across the country?
The communities are near each other.  Most of the communities are in the city called Forest Lake and one is in a city of Blaine.

Are you seeing subpages of corporate sites ranking in the local search results for any of your communities?
Yes, our subpages are ranking.  The one community in the city of Blaine is ranking consistently at the top in local search.  The rest of the communities in Forest Lake are having mixed results.  But there are times we will see two communities take a spot in the top three local search engine results.

Is there any administrative value to separating the websites? Outside of SEO considerations.
No, it would be easier to have one website instead of multiple.

I work for a company that owns and manages apartments.  I would like to know which of the two website design decisions are better from an SEO perspective:

1. One single website that contains pages for all of our apartments.  (Example: http://www.equityapartments.com)
2. Separate websites for each apartment and one main corporate website allows users to search through our apartments.  (Example: https://www.greystar.com)

I have spoken to three marketing companies have all recommended option 2.  The best reason I have heard is because then the separate apartments are all more likely to rank.  They say Google doesn't want to rank multiple pages of the same website.But Google would still know that I have an administrative relationship between the sites.  (Source: https://moz.com/blog/how-google-knows-what-sites-you-control-and-why-it-matters-whiteboard-friday)  So I don't know why they would treat multiple sites differently than one site?For what it's worth, it seems the majority of apartment management companies use a different website for each property.So should have a separate website for each of their properties?