20 Creative Ways to Follow Up with Apartment Rental Leads

Many PMCs follow established processes for managing leads, but in today’s dynamic landscape, it’s crucial to reassess and adapt. The events of the last few years made us witness significant shifts in consumer behavior and the “digital” trend hasn’t stopped growing. The influx of young renters and digitally savvy buyers has also reshaped the leasing landscape, which keeps on moving to an online approach.

To compete today, you need to be very good at generating leads digitally and very good at nurturing those leads the way today’s modern renters wish to be engaged.

In our experience, it’s best to approach apartment rental lead generation and nurturing through experimentation and observation. But know that not every customer will react the same to the same marketing touch. Lead follow-up and conversions depend on where the customer is at in their buying journey and their personal communication preferences (more on that later.)

It’s time to remove the guesswork and apply these 20 creative techniques for rental leads.

1. Treat Your Website Like Your Top Marketing Channel

Recognize that your website is your greatest asset.  When a website converts leads to leases, you get new lease revenue at a low cost, so having this perform well for you is paramount.

To get the most out of your website, you need to be able to engage in the ways that consumers now expect. Since today’s apartment shopper is looking months in advance and doing considerable research on their own before they are ready to tour, we need to be able to engage with them the way they want.  They want to explore multiple properties, understand neighborhoods, compare floor plans and rental rates to develop a shortlist. And they want to do it 24/7/365. However, multifamily teams are not equipped with the staff to engage with these shoppers in this way. It’s simply more than lean teams can handle.

Platforms like PERQ are designed to engage today’s digital renters. Its natural language chatbot gathers info from the prospect and uses it to personalize the automated nurture messaging. PERQ can help guide the prospect in their shopping journey by showing them floor plans in their budget, units with amenities they are looking for, and answering their questions 24/7.

2. Create Compelling Next Steps For The Prospect

With AI technology, you’re able to create personalized interactions for the prospect based on their online behavior. Do they respond better to touches in SMS vs. email? AI software can proactively determine the next best touch.

By making the consumer journey more personalized and easier to follow for the prospect, they will become endeared to your brand.

3. Interactive Tools That Inform

Signing a lease is a big financial and emotional commitment. Committing to paying a fixed rate every month and moving to a new location makes the decision to sign a lease with a property one that takes a lot of thought. Multifamily properties can help prospects in their decision-making process by having interactive online tools such as a rent calculator to give them an idea of total costs, including utilities, and a community-fit assessment so they can see upfront if the area has what they’re looking for without having to visit.

These sorts of interactive tools also help weed out low-intent leads from those who are serious and qualified to apply.

4. Engage Leads With Video

Draw the customer in with a customized video on your website or in follow-up emails. From a tour of the community to a tour of the specific floor plans they were looking at, video increases traffic and interest.

“Prospective residents or shoppers can gather information online, engage with a video tour, and, for a growing number of consumers, that’s enough to make them convert or sign a lease. Video is the way to do that,” says Matt Weirich, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Realync, a video-leasing platform company that partners with PERQ to embed tour videos on our AI-powered website platform on multifamily property websites. Weirich goes more into the importance of video below:

5. Special Promotions

Build in special offers on your company’s website or in follow-up emails, but be sure those promotions are geared towards the floor plans and specific amenities the person is looking for in their next lease.

The goal is to entice a prospect and make them walk through your doors and say, ‘Hey, I have this offer I received on your website.”

6. AI Chatbots

Chatbots have become increasingly popular in the multifamily industry. Not only does an AI chatbot make your website more interactive, it can offer support and answer questions 24/7. Prospects don’t need to wait for the leasing office to open and can get what they are looking for much faster. The conversations a prospect has with the chatbot are also typically available in their guest card in the CRM, so leasing teams know what not to ask and can enter the initial conversation more prepared. With so many AI chatbots geared towards multifamily websites to choose from, knowing the main differences in how they “chat” is important.

There are natural language chatbots and rule-based chatbots. Natural language chatbots are also called AI chatbots, and they talk to prospects in a more natural way. For the prospect, they are having a real conversation, similar to that with a human, and can get their questions answered faster. With rules-based chatbots, prospects go through prompts that are set as “rules” and may or may not get their initial questions answered. Have you ever called customer service and got a robot menu telling you to “Press 1 for x, press 2 for…”? That’s the same logic as a rule-based chatbot except instead of a phone, the prospect is typing the answers on your website. This can be more frustrating. When looking between the two, a natural language chatbot gives a better user experience and, therefore, better customer service.

7. Qualified Leads Only

Not all people who visit your property website are ready to tour or even sign a lease. How they interact with your website provides insight into where they are in the leasing journey. Your messages to them need to appropriately match where they are in the leasing process.

PERQ’s lead generation and nurture platform uses AI technology to automate lead management. It understands where a prospect is in the funnel and handles all the follow-up until your leads are ready to speak to a member of the team. Using this kind of technology helps to save time for your team. No more sifting through leads and hoping that the ones you’ve picked are serious and qualified to rent. Learn how PERQ works.

8. Interactive Floor Plans

Prospects love a 3D interactive floor plan. It allows for them to fully picture the unit without having to visit in person. Whether it’s health or being located out of state, there are lots of reasons a serious prospect might not be able to come in and tour in person.

Above, we mentioned engaging through video in follow-up. The interactive floor plan models take this a step further to keep them engaged on your property website longer.

Prospects look at multiple property websites before deciding which ones to continue to engage with. The longer a prospect is on your website, the more data you can collect on them, and the more memorable your property will be. Having 3D floor plan models will help you stand out in a crowded market.

9. Quick Response Times

Respond quickly to renter leads who are in the market rent now to increase your chances of catching the consumer while they’re still engaged. Immediately connecting with a qualified customer who is already on your site and engaged decreases the chances they’ll go to a competitor’s website. One way to do this is with an AI leasing assistant solution, like the one in the PERQ platform. It keeps apartment rental leads engaged and answers their questions 24/7, so they don’t have to wait for business hours.

10. Resident Testimonials & Blogs

Having a blog for any kind of business is a good move. Sending outbound communications with resident testimonials and/or links to your blog posts about what it’s like to live in your community is a great way to personalize your multifamily outreach and give it a more human touch. While consumers expect automation now, it’s important to remember that there is an emotional aspect to renting.

These blogs and testimonials don’t need to be sent out with every touch; they can be added in when the prospect is closer to talking to a leasing specialist to help solidify their decision.

11. Convenient Scheduling

Include scheduling tools on your website so serious prospects can easily arrange a tour of your apartment community.

Getting them to visit in person is more than half the battle to convert online leads. Let them make the first move, and conveniently do so on their own time. Talk about instant gratification!

12. A Clean CRM

A crowded and cluttered CRM is bad for any business. In multifamily, it leads to leads being lost or overlooked. A messy CRM takes up a lot of the leasing team’s time and gives them more work than they need.

A less crowded CRM that only has good leads in it means that leasing teams can do their jobs more efficiently and properly.

13. Email, Text, Or Phone?

Each customer prefers a specific way to communicate — phone, email, text, chat or in-person. To build trust, follow up with your customers via their preferred method of contact.

With the preferred method also comes a preferred time of day. Contacting serious leads during a time they have stated they are most likely to respond is equally important. According to PERQ data, nationally, renters prefer email follow-up in the morning. Read our article to learn other tips for effective text communication.

Barratt Asset Management embraces whatever platform the customer prefers. “The new communication channels have vastly impacted lead nurturing,” says Catherine Azar, Director of Property Management. ”We can do FaceTime calls and tours, and it’s really a game-changer. People from out of state can see your face and it provides comfortability and starts building that trust.”

14. Automate Lead Follow-up Campaigns

Using AI nurture technology, you can tailor experiences to the various stages of the leasing journey, so your team can dedicate their time where it counts – in-person relationship building.

The best nurture approaches use more than one channel, like SMS and text, and adjust the scheduled emails or text messages to automatically arrive at a cadence appropriate for each prospect.

Any multifamily AI chatbot you choose should be able to handle automated lead nurture and follow-up. PERQ’s AI chatbot handles all of this but also does it through your brand voice. This way, prospects have a better experience with your follow-up messaging as it feels less robotic and uses the data it collected about them to know when to send a message and when to pull back. Chatbot software should only hand off qualified leads to the onsite team that are ready to talk, tour, or lease. The AI chatbot handles the rest and manages your pipeline more efficiently.

15. Insightful Data To Back Follow-Up

When the team is crafting a unique email to a prospect, be sure to include some personalized customer information. Leveraging in-depth customer data garnered from your website platform or CRM creates an instant connection with prospects and helps your salespeople start the conversation from a position of insight.

Azar stresses the value of emotional intelligence. “You have to be able to handle interpersonal relationships with knowledge and care, while understanding that each prospect has different moving circumstances — there’s never a one size fits all.”

Smart website technology gives your company valuable consumer behavior insights. By regularly analyzing that data, you can spot trends and anticipate the evolving wants and needs in your market. Proactively sharing valuable content that highlights the latest trends in your industry or helpful advice can reignite their interest in your property by giving them a reason to think about you and helping them with research. Content such as “5 tips for hiring a moving company” or “What you should ask on a property tour” are great examples.

17. The Right CRM

The right CRM is of utmost importance when collecting, tracking, and analyzing large sets of consumer lead data. A lot happens in the digital space and it continues to evolve. Look for a data management system that provides valuable information you can sort and prioritize and works as an extension of your team.

Prioritizing your prospects helps when allocating time and deciding who to reach out to first. Prospects who have taken virtual or in-person tours, filled out an online pre-qualification application or utilized an expense calculator feature on the property website provide valuable information about where they are in the customer journey. 

“We utilize our CRM to leverage our data as best we can,” says Marcella Eppsteiner, Vice President of Marketing at Mission Rock Residential. “We overlay our website insights in terms of prospect engagement with a series of other data points, from our property management software and Google Analytics, just to better understand the activity of the consumer.”

18. Leverage Data To Increase Higher Quality Leads To Your Website

As we discussed, you can capture a lot of data about a consumer, such as when they’re in the market to rent, what amenities they want the most in an apartment, what they want in the community, and the activities they enjoy most. Leverage the most common answers in your digital engagement efforts to help you make decisions on on-site improvements and rental rates. Use these to attract higher-quality website visitors and retarget leads who already visited your site.

19. Improve The Conversation

Your sales teams can learn a lot about leads on your website. Have them leverage the data in the CRM so they are more likely to close the sale, either by phone, chat, text, or email. Again, if a visitor told you they prefer a text, don’t make your first outreach a call. A text might start: “I saw you were looking at the two-bedroom floor plan with two-baths on our site, (Insert first name). Did you have any questions I can help you with?” Being personable and helpful can go a long way.

20. Don’t Forget To Say “Thank You”

In these times of advanced technology and digital messaging, people still appreciate when a company takes the time to send a handwritten thank-you note or follow up with a phone call after an initial in-person interaction. Connecting on a personal level is the touchstone of any creative lead follow-up strategy.

“Use emotional intelligence to handle interpersonal relationships with knowledge and care, while factoring in and understanding different circumstances impact lead follow-up,” says Azar. “Good salespeople are really important.”

PERQ integrates with your existing website and lead sources to engage, nurture and convert every lead, improving the multifamily leasing journey for everyone.

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