There are lots of ways to generate apartment rental leads. The most important way is having an engaging website that is set up to collect insightful data on the prospect as they click through your website. Recent trends have resulted in more casual, online shoppers on property websites.
This has led to a dramatic increase in leads, but many of these “leads” aren’t serious prospects or are going to move 3+ months out. There are two main things to keep in mind when trying to generate better quality leads for your multifamily community — SEO and an interactive website.
SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is an important part of any marketing strategy in the digital age. Prospects aren’t looking for their next home on community boards or Yellow Pages. They look at an ILS or search online and typically don’t go past the second page of results. Getting your apartment website ranked higher up in organic searches is a great way to capture more people’s attention and have them go directly to your website.
How can you rank higher up? You need to know the keywords that prospects are using to search for apartments. There are tools and even agencies out there that can help you with this. Knowing if they are looking for “apartments near me” or “apartments for rent” is important. Once you know which keywords you need to hit, you can add those into your website copy so it can be easier to find.
While this helps your multifamily property website become easier to find, it still doesn’t help that there’s a huge amount of casual online visitors clogging up your system. Unified Residential is one of many multifamily property companies facing this issue. The way they solved it was with leasing AI.
AI LEASING ASSISTANT
Unified decided to hire PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant to help with the increase in property management leads. By keeping these casual online shoppers engaged and nurtured through text and email, they are seeing more qualified leads and tours. The added benefit, according to Dalia Kalgreen, Director of Marketing at Unified is that “It takes a lot of time for your leasing team to sift through what we call ‘looky-loos,’ when they could be working on more serious leads.”
How does that work? Since many people begin their searches months in advance, the AI Leasing Assistant knows this and tailors the follow-up to meet their timeline. This way when it is time for them to talk to a leasing specialist or go on a tour, the Assistant will have kept your property top of mind and give the leasing team detailed information on what that lead is looking for.
Generating more leads doesn’t mean to clog up your system and have leasing teams spend their time sifting through the clutter. Having a tool that helps identify which leads are important, which ones it can nurture for a bit, and which ones are just “looky-loos” will improve your operational efficiency and increase your website conversions.
