Leasing Genius

Top Survey Results

By Geneva Ives on Jun 9, 2015 in Marketing

Do you know how to take the leasing lead in your market? It might be easier than you think!

The results of our recent leasing strategy survey revealed that smart multifamily firms have multiple opportunities to increase performance and out-market, out-lease, and out-renew the competition. But to beat the competition, you have to know what they’re up to, right?

To that end, we put together these top three takeaways from the responses to our survey of multifamily marketing and leasing professionals across the industry:

87% of property management companies surveyed don’t recognize/reward good follow up activity.
Create a strong follow up tracking and recognition program to shape your company culture to instantly outperform 87% of your competitors!

64% of companies have no way to monitor resident relationship activity (interactions with residents).
Track and reward resident relationships to prevent the loss of good residents. This will also help you impress new leads coming from other communities who don’t carefully manage the resident experience.

52% of responders don’t set a cost-per-lead goal, and 42% don’t have a cost per-lease-goal.
Set concrete goals and measure your performance after one quarter. Is there room for improvement or are you doing better than you expected? Adjust accordingly.

“Marketing budgets are limited,” notes Esther Bonardi, industry principal of Yardi Marketing Solutions. “Without standards and measures in place to ensure you are getting enough traffic for your marketing spend, you will easily end up with fewer leads than companies who use ROI reporting to make good marketing decisions.”

It’s critical to identify opportunities where you can exceed competitor performance and commit to improvement in those key areas. Establishing standards and tracking results is essential to keeping your team on top of the market.

Other interesting survey findings include:

• 46% of respondents expect agents to follow up with leads “until they lease”
• 37% don’t require a set number of follow ups
• 58% use lead management software to determine if agents have completed required follow ups
• 26% don’t have required response times for web or email leads
• 46% don’t have a standard resident contact schedule throughout the lease lifecycle
• 28% contact/follow up with residents on their birthdays
• 56% participate in resident survey programs
• 70% incentivize renewals, while 30% do not
• 64% have no way to monitor resident relationship management
• 45% monitor only lead-to-lease conversions, while 52% also monitor lead-to-appointment conversions

It’s easy to use this information to give your properties an advantage by putting into place programs and incentives that encourage your leasing agents to follow up with new leads and keep in touch with current residents. When you use the Yardi Marketing Suite to optimize and integrate your marketing strategies, you gain access to tools like LeasingPad CRM, an end-to-end leasing and customer relationship management solution that is designed to maximize marketing ROI.

“Lead management and resident relationship management programs must be embedded within the corporate culture to achieve stellar results,” says Bonardi. “This requires clear guidelines for onsite professionals, as well as tools to keep customer relationship management from slipping through the cracks.”

Which of these survey results did you find to be most surprising?