Implementing Marketing Automation in Multifamily Leasing

Leasing consultants face busy days full of contacting interested prospects, scheduling and giving property tours, answering questions from potential renters, as well as assisting current residents. Their diverse job roles often include marketing, customer service and sales.

Property managers who oversee local leasing offices for a multifamily property group spend their workdays calculating the costs of each lead and lease, analyzing digital marketing performance and the performance of individual leasing agents, while also evaluating occupancy and tenant turnover.

Marketing automation increases efficiencies for a multifamily property at every level of business operations, reducing the amount of manual work required to nurture leads and convert leases, while also providing property managers with data reporting that delivers smarter, actionable insights to save money and improve results. Lease automation works 24/7 so leasing agents and their managers don’t need to, using AI technology to automatically collect and nurture leads at a lower cost than manually marketing the property.

Like the old business axiom says: work smarter, not harder. Here’s a glimpse at how automated marketing improves efficiencies for multifamily property management companies.

Automated Marketing on Multifamily Websites

The Bainbridge Companies added AI-driven property lease management software to two of its apartment websites, which averaged 6 and 26 monthly website leads. Before implementing automated marketing, the property websites acted more like online brochures and gathered very little insights from visitors. Heidi Jehlicka, Sr. VP of Marketing and Employee Development at Bainbridge, says the company wanted to gather more data on what customers were specifically seeking and find a way to automatically influence more leases with an apartment leasing software solution.

Within two months, the two websites successfully converted 732 unique website visitors to email leads by automatically capturing information on each prospect who engaged with the interactive website experiences. The monthly lead average for the Bainbridge properties jumped from 6 to 269 on one property website and 26 to 96 on the other. With an increase in online leads, a proper lease management system is needed so leasing agents can only focus on the qualified leads that are ready to talk, tour, or lease. With PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant, an innovative property management software that helps improve operational efficiency, onsite teams save hours of work and are able to increase their lead to lease conversion numbers.

With those leads came high-quality data on exactly what each person wanted in an apartment community and where those prospects came from before visiting the website, allowing management to see precisely which digital marketing efforts paid off. The intuitive websites guide prospects along the leasing journey, and nurture leads with automated but personalized calls to action and online assessments geared toward their specific search. In the first 60 days of implementation, PERQ’s AI platform influenced an average 27% of all leases signed at the two Bainbridge properties. It also significantly lowered the company’s costs per lead and per lease when compared to its other lead generation sources, Jehlicka says.

The leasing agents at those Bainbridge communities now spend more time giving personal attention to in-person inquiries and the customer service aspect of their job duties, instead of dividing their day with a multitude of manual tasks with varying objectives as they have a lease management software that they can trust to handle all of the other tasks.

“We can use that time to focus on a lot of other things instead of manually nurturing and chasing leads, like taking care of the customer and giving better tours,” Jehlicka says. Because website visitors receive so much helpful information online, Jehlicka says they often arrive at the leasing office knowing exactly what they want and are more likely to sign a lease.

Marketing Automation for Email Nurture, Lead Management & Digital Advertising

Beyond using property management automation to make multifamily websites more effective, property management companies can use AI and machine learning technology to automate many other aspects of the business and improve efficiencies.

By automatically storing and organizing lead information into a CRM lead management system that follows a multi-touch attribution model, leasing agents get in-depth information on each lead to use when following up. Leasing management learns exactly which digital and in-person interactions resulted in a lease and at what cost. That includes digital advertising campaigns, which can be automatically adjusted in real-time and targeted toward ideal consumer profiles configured from big sets of data when used as part of a marketing cloud.

An AI platform unifies all of the lead information and various integrated systems to give multifamily companies the power to automate the email nurture process in a way that still feels conversational, using the stored prospect data to personalize each message and time the delivery of each message, driving the leads back to the website to further engage. It also delivers property management with data reporting and analytics detailing each consumer’s journey as well as marketing intelligence insights to help make better marketing decisions.

“We’ve got a lot more intelligence on these two properties,” Jehlicka says. In addition to the significant increase in online leads generated from the automated marketing solution, the company gains valuable insights into what prospects desire most in each market. “That’s critical information.”

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