How to Improve the Lead to Lease Conversion Rate of Your Multifamily Property

Arguably one of the most important metrics for multifamily and property management, lead to lease conversion is key to understanding if your operations are working efficiently. There are many elements that drive lead to lease conversion for multifamily properties. From lead generation to nurture to the interactions with the leasing team, getting a good lead to lease conversion rate means that there’s a solid strategy behind and you have the right tools to get there.

It takes a lot of work and effort to get leases signed and keep residents satisfied and wanting to renew. Too often multifamily CRMs are cluttered with all kinds of leads leaving the leasing team to spend time sifting through and hoping to find the right one. However, the innovations and solutions that have emerged in recent years allow technology to optimize these processes and let teams make smarter decisions to improve their lead to lease conversion rates. From virtual leasing to leasing AI, multifamily has more tools than ever to gather better data, meet consumer buying habits, and more personalized follow-up/lead nurture.

In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the best methods you can use to increase your lead to lease conversion rate by making it more intelligent, automated, optimized and efficient.

Increase Your Lead to Lease Conversion with PERQ

What is Lead to Lease Conversion?

In the universe of property management and Real Estate, lead to lease conversion is a term that refers to the process of turning prospective renters or tenants (i.e., the leads) into actual tenants (i.e., the leases).

Everyone who’s been exposed to multifamily terminology knows that increasing your lead to lease conversion rate is one of the cornerstone goals of a property manager. That rate refers to the percentage of leads that successfully sign a lease agreement and ultimately move into the property.

For multifamily property management companies (PMCs), lead to lease conversion is an essential key performance indicator, or KPI. Lead to lease conversion lets you know how well your marketing funnel is performing and, when managed properly, can help ensure your marketing spend is being used wisely.

What Factors Contribute to a Low Lead to Lease Conversion Rate?

There are a lot of factors that can impact your lead to lease conversion numbers. These include the quality of leads that are coming in from different lead sources, how engaging and interactive your website is, the follow up process you use with prospects, and the onsite team, to name a few. With lead to lease being an essential KPI for PMCs, trying to improve it is a high priority.

A study done by MarketingSherpa found that 79% of leads don’t convert due to a poor lead management solution. Luckily, in the last few years, multifamily and property management in general has seen a lot of innovation in technology solutions that center around multifamily lead management.

Generating leads from your website doesn’t automatically make all of those leads good quality or high-intent leads. A lot of those leads can be low-intent or even just casual online browsers who are looking at apartment websites in their free time. This still leads to the problem of an overcrowded and cluttered CRM.

Learn How to Increase Your Multifamily Lead to Lease Conversion

These days, PMCs that want to improve their lead to lease conversion have a variety of leasing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help them. Leasing AI can help multifamily teams navigate through those rough waters. There are also methods to improve the way your team has to face and manage incoming leads. From properly assessing them, to creating personalized experiences or following up assertively.

Here are 5 methods and tools we’ve witnessed and tested to have the highest impact on this important metric.

#1 Generate High-Quality Leads Using Your Property Website

Lead generation for multifamily property management companies mainly comes from the property website or listings on an ILS or other marketing channel. The property website is the most important asset a multifamily property management company has when it comes to lead generation. Prospects typically view a few property websites before making a decision on which ones they are leaning towards touring or finding out more information from.

leade to lease conversion | PERQ AI Leasing Assistant

Property websites need to be interactive and engaging in order to stand out to online visitors. Tools like an AI chatbot, budget calculator, explore the community, etc are great to have as they can also collect insightful data on the prospect as they work through the site and interactive features. This kind of data can then be used in automated lead follow up and when the leasing team does talk to them or give them a tour. They can cater the conversation to what the prospect is looking for from the beginning.

Generating leads from your website doesn’t automatically make all of those leads good quality or high-intent leads. A lot of those leads can be low-intent or even just casual online browsers who are looking at apartment websites in their free time. This still leads to the problem of an overcrowded and cluttered CRM.

This is where software comes into play. Above, tools like chatbots and calculators were mentioned. These kinds of tools are typically one of solutions or widgets from different tech companies. At PERQ, the complete automation platform incorporates these kinds of tools into an all-in-one solution. This means that the data collected from lead generation is then used by PERQ’s AI-powered platform to know which leads are high-intent. With this data, automated lead nurture begins through tech like PERQ.

The leasing team has still not touched the lead at this point because they aren’t ready to be handed off to the team. PERQ understands this and handles all of the leads generated at the top of the funnel and doesn’t hand them off to the CRM until they are ready to be talked to by the leasing team, whether through a tour or to begin the application process.

#2 Personalize Multifamily Lead Automation

Studies show that renters look at several property websites during their search. That means there are other PMCs that have data on the prospect and can use it in their nurture messaging. The difference is, not a lot of automated lead nurture tools allow for personalization or the kind of data they are able to collect on the prospect isn’t as insightful.

Prospects will have other properties besides yours in their inbox trying to get them to come in and tour. To stand out, personalization becomes even more important. This is why curating content and reusing it will help your property stand out in prospect’s inboxes.

Leads are being generated from the website, but as mentioned there are too many to be considered good leads. Automating the lead nurture process allows for that technology to sift through the leads and keep the more serious one’s top of mind. According to data from PERQ’s latest edition of the Multifamily Field Guide, around 30% of renters are looking 1 month from when they would need to move. An additional 40% are looking 3+ months out, half of this being 6+ months out.

Those are still serious leads; they just are looking farther ahead than most multifamily property companies expect. Automated lead nurture is essential to make sure leads further down the pipeline are not lost and so the leasing team doesn’t have to worry about them. They can focus on the high-intent leads that are ready to move within a month as Daniel Paulino from Bozzuto dives into below:

Prospects are looking at multiple property websites which means they’re going to be in a few automated follow up cadences with different properties. To stand out in inboxes, a property’s follow up needs to be more personalized. A feature of PERQ is customizable follow up communication. With PERQ, multifamily properties automated follow up can be personalized to the property’s brand colors and even brand voice.

While today’s consumers expect automation and robotic communication, that doesn’t mean multifamily properties can’t sound more human in their automated follow up. With the data collected from the prospect’s time on the website interacting with all those tools, software like PERQ uses that information to cater the follow up to hit their inboxes in a timely manner. It also knows when to pull back and not overcrowd the lead’s inbox.

#3 Learn How to Effectively Follow Up On Your Apartment Leasing Prospects

Following up on a prospect to lease an apartment can be difficult. You don’t want to bombard their inbox with messages, but you also don’t want them to forget about your property. It’s a fine balance. PERQ’s automated lead nurture capabilities are designed with this worry in mind. It knows when to pull back and when to send messages.

It’s important to also think of the actual content in nurture messages. Curating and creating blog posts on what it’s like living in your community can be used for more than just SEO purposes. This content can be sent to prospects in a cadence to show them a fuller picture of life in your neighborhood. PMCs that have student housing in their portfolio have begun using TikTok and Instagram Reels more to spread brand awareness. They also create videos on moving tips, different floor plans, decor DIYs and more.

These videos can be reused in both your automated nurture messaging and follow up from the onsite team. PMCs can put themselves in a box when it comes to what follow up messaging should say. It can and should be more than just about the unit they were looking at. While you are selling a specific unit to someone, you are also selling the entire neighborhood as well. For out of state prospects this is especially helpful in getting them to see the location and how the property fits into the local scene.

Example of a follow-up in a cellphone that shows how to nurture prospective renters to increase lead to lease conversion in multifamily

The AI Leasing Assistant’s follow-up is more personalized to your property and to the prospect than any old sample follow up email to prospective client you can find online. With PERQ, you can customize your follow-up messaging to be in your brand colors and brand voice. It sounds and looks less automated/robotic and more human. Even though many prospects know it’s most likely an automated email, the personalization gives it that edge that makes it stand out in their inbox.

To the right is an example of what a follow up email after apartment viewing, follow up email after rental application, or thank you letter after viewing an apartment would look like with PERQ. The brand color and voice really makes the email stand out and grabs your attention. This kind of follow-up leads to more leases because it gives a positive impression of the property and the team and is more recognizable than a leasing follow-up email template.

To learn more about how an AI Leasing Assistant can help your multifamily property increase lead to lease conversion, talk to one of our specialists today and check out our resources

#4 Use Inspiration From Successful PMCs

After years of working with hundreds of property owners and Property Management Companies, we’ve learned a lot of lessons by looking at our customer’s data.

The only way to truly know if leasing AI software improves your lead to lease conversion is to see the data and success. Unified Residential, like many multifamily companies, wants to improve their lead to lease conversion especially after the massive increase in online leads in recent years.

Dalia Kalgreen, Director of Marketing, decided to hire PERQ’s leasing AI platform for the job. The numbers speak for themselves. Unified increased their website conversion 3X and their lead to tour by over 83%. “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,” says Kalgreen.

Having PERQ’s leasing AI software work on their property websites has increased their operational efficiency and made their website more engaging and interactive. This means that prospects are staying on their website longer and looking at more info. You can read more about Unified Residential’s success and see just how many of their metrics improved after hiring PERQ for the job.

#5 Learn How to Use PERQ to Increase Your Lead to Lease Conversion Rate

With better lead generation and automated software, multifamily properties can see an increase lead to lease conversion rate and apartment rental close rate. As mentioned earlier, the success of a salesperson is dependent on the quality of the lead. Leasing specialists are in the position of salespeople at the property. They are trying to get more leases signed and hopefully have lower turnover in the future. This happens when leasing teams can focus on high-intent, quality leads.

When the property website is generating more leads and there’s software in place to collect meaningful data which is then used in automated lead nurture, the overall operational efficiency of a property improves. PERQ has been operating on hundreds of property websites all over the country and has executed more than 4 million consumer experiences through the tools that come with it like a natural language AI chatbot, budget calculator, schedule a tour, etc.

Before PERQ, Dalia Kalgreen, Director of Marketing at Unified Residential, estimated that Unified’s property websites were converting close to 2% of traffic. With PERQ on their property websites, Unified’s website conversion increased 3x in just 60 days. Online visitors are engaged as they interact with the property website and nurtured until they are ready to be handed off to the leasing team. Unified’s leasing teams can work with less distractions and give serious leads a better experience on tours. Dalia estimates that on average they are seeing 325 leads come through PERQ and of that 83% have already scheduled a tour.

Property management companies expect leasing teams to be able to execute their job efficiently. This can’t be done if the CRM is cluttered, and all kinds of leads are being handed to them. With PERQ, multifamily properties operational efficiency improves as leasing teams are only talking to leads that are serious about leasing at the property. Kalgreen goes more into this below:

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

Try PERQ Now!