Is your community ready for Halloween? Onsite events are a fun way to bring residents together and keep everyone feeling engaged. With these spooky ideas, you can offer your residents a frightfully delightful holiday.
1. Encourage residents of all ages to dress up
Spread the Halloween spirit by hosting a Halloween costume contest for all ages. Organize the event on site, in your community room or outdoor space, and nominate a panel of judges to award prizes.
Depending on how many participants you have, you may want to designate categories for specific ages — such as babies and toddlers, kids under 12, teens and tweens, and adults — and awards like Best Family Costume or Best Couple’s Costume.
2. Host a pet costume contest on social media
Don’t let your furry residents miss out on the fun! Throughout the month, encourage residents and employees to post their pets in costume on social media and use a designated hashtag. With permission, repost these images to your community’s main channel. At the end of the month, send gift cards to the best-dressed pets!
This is a great way to let even the shyest four-legged residents participate. It can also boost engagement with your social media channels. Win-win!
3. Teach residents to carve jack-o-lanterns
Organize a pumpkin carving workshop before Halloween. Encourage residents to bring their pumpkins and their imaginations. To facilitate the event, have an experienced carver on site to lead the workshop and help residents troubleshoot common problems. Print out popular patterns, and provide an ample supply of carving tools.
4. Designate specific hours for trick-or-treating
Going trick-or-treating in an apartment community is a fun, safe way for young residents to celebrate Halloween and for all residents to get to know each other. For a smooth event, announce an official day and time for trick-or-treating within the community.
Ask residents who plan to hand out candy to sign up in advance, and give them colorful flyers they can post on their doors to mark their participation. This makes it easy for kids and parents to identify at a glance which doors to knock on.
5. Share Halloween candy in the leasing office
For a sweet boost of energy throughout the month, fill a bowl with wrapped sweets. Place it in a central location for residents and visitors to enjoy, like your leasing office or community room. This low-key option is a simple way to recognize Halloween without much planning needed.
6. Make a haunted house
Transform your community room or outdoor space into a haunted house! You can use sheets or cardboard to put up temporary walls or even build a maze. To create a creepy atmosphere, light the space with dim bulbs or just flashlights and lanterns, and create a scary soundtrack. Fill the haunted house with spider webs, blood-curdling props, and the occasional team member jumping out in costume.
7. Throw a cookie-decorating party
For a Halloween event that’s more delicious than it is terrifying, host a cookie-decorating workshop. Encourage residents of all ages to join in and turn plain sugar cookies into fantastic creations.
Looking for cute classic ideas? Cut out cookies in the shapes of pumpkins, ghosts, or bats, and use icing and sprinkles to decorate them.
For a creepy touch, try creating “spider” cookies with peanut butter cups and icing, or top your cookies with dates as “cockroaches.” You can apply lots of raspberry or strawberry jam to mimic blood, and cotton candy can transform into cobwebs.
8. Host a scary movie night
Bring your community together for a scary film festival. Pick out a scary movie or two, and turn your community room into a theater. If you don’t have a big-screen TV, borrow a projector to display the film onto a blank wall.
Just make sure to get a public performance license for any copyrighted movies you’re planning to show. If you’d rather skip this step, you can choose a classic horror film from the public domain.
9. Set up a Halloween selfie corner
Got a free corner in your leasing office, community room, or even your fitness center? Give this space a full Halloween makeover, and designate it your community’s Halloween selfie station. Encourage residents to photograph themselves and their friends and family and post the pics to social media, tagging your community.
You can give your selfie station a specific theme based on your favorite scary book, movie, or TV show, or opt for Halloween-themed balloons, cobwebs, and plastic spiders.
Looking for more community event ideas?
Keep your residents engaged year-round with these tips:
What is Apartmentology?
Your source for multifamily insights, Apartmentology brings you the latest data and analysis from industry experts.
