Job Description
Director of Marketing — Multifamily
Gaines Investment Trust
Location: Our La Jolla (San Diego) office — this is an office-based position
Type: Full time, salaried, in the office Monday through Friday. You are out of the office only when traveling.
Travel: Quarterly — four multi-market trips a year, covering all 32 communities within twelve months (Dallas, Tulsa, Phoenix/Tucson, Las Vegas, Lawrence KS, and Southern California)
Base salary: $120,000
Bonus: Up to 25% of base, paid on marketing cost reduction and traffic growth
About Us
Gaines Investment Trust is a family-owned real estate company founded in 1966. We own about 8,300 apartments across 32 communities in six states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
We are not a third-party management company. We own everything we manage and we manage nothing we don’t own. We buy good long-term locations, hold them, take care of the buildings, and take care of our residents. Everyone who works here is expected to think like an owner, because they work for one.
The Job
This is a new position, and it is a builder’s job.
Right now an outside agency runs our pay-per-click advertising and manages several of our internet listing accounts. We are bringing all of that in house. We do no social media for our properties at all. Our websites sit on a template platform and do not get updated the way they should.
We are hiring one person to fix all three and to own marketing for all 8,300 units — the budget, the ad accounts, the websites, the social channels, and the brand.
Ready to Take the Next Step? Tell Us More Than a Résumé Can.We want to learn more about you—your marketing experience, strategic approach, creativity, and what you could bring to Gaines Investment Trust.
Move directly to the next step in our hiring process by completing a short one-way video interview through Spark Hire.
The interview can be completed from your phone, tablet, or computer at a time that works for you.
Please note: Once you access the Spark Hire interview, you will have 3 days to complete and submit it.
What You Will Do
Take our pay-per-click advertising away from the outside agency and run it yourself, in house
Bring the internet listing accounts the agency currently manages back under our own control
Own the Google Ads accounts for every community — build them, budget them, and tune them every week
Drive cost per lead down and lease volume up, and be able to prove both with numbers
Build social media for our properties from zero — pick the platforms, create the content, and run it
Update our property websites yourself — you will be in the template making changes regularly, not sending requests to a vendor
Build and manage one marketing budget for the whole portfolio
Negotiate all internet listing contracts as one company instead of 32 separate buyers
Track every lead — where it came from, what it cost, and whether it turned into a lease
Own our brand: logo, colors, fonts, signs, photography, video, and floor plans
Manage online reviews and Google listings for every community
Visit every property over the course of the year and work directly with regional managers and onsite teams
Report results to ownership every month in plain numbers
What We Are Looking For
Real hands-on pay-per-click experience — you have personally built and managed Google Ads accounts, not just reviewed an agency report
You can talk about your own cost per lead numbers and exactly what you did to improve them
5+ years marketing apartments, including work across more than one property
A good eye for web design, and the ability to make changes on a template website yourself
Social media experience — you have built or run business accounts and know what actually gets engagement
Experience buying and negotiating internet listing contracts
Hands-on with Yardi or RentCafe (or a similar system), Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Business Profile
Comfortable in a spreadsheet — you can build a budget and defend it
Able to work full time in our La Jolla office and travel quarterly to the markets
Bachelor’s degree preferred, not required if the experience is there
Where You Will Work
This is an office job. You will work out of our La Jolla office in San Diego, Monday through Friday. This is not a remote or hybrid position. The only time you are out of the office is when you are traveling to the markets, which happens roughly once a quarter.
What We Offer
$120,000 base salary
Bonus up to 25% of base
Health benefits, paid time off, and holidays
A seat at the table — you report to ownership and your decisions stick
A clean slate — you are building this function, not inheriting someone else’s
To apply: Submit your resume. Selected candidates will complete a short recorded video interview.
