AIM 2023: An Owner, Operator, and ILS Walk into a Bar...

Self-guided tour scheduling, AI, and happier associates improve performance.

Apartments.com research shows that about 40 percent of renters are willing to sign a lease at a property sight unseen. Many renters are fine with seeing how far down the marketing funnel they can go before they have to speak to a human. This is how many industries work. People are used to it. The apartment industry can do it, too.

“It’s all about ‘How can we make it easier for our customers,’” according to Chris Hood, Senior Director of Marketing at Apartments.com.

Hood was part of a panel that discussed marketing during the 2023 Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference on May 7-10 in Huntington Beach, Calif.

He was joined by Scott Wesson, Chief Digital Officer at UDR; Windell Mollenido, Vice President of Marketing and Technology at The REMM Group, AMO; and moderator Brock MacLean, EVP & CRO at LeaseHawk.

“Apartment listings provide so much more perspective now, such as down to unit-level details,” Hood said. “We can show prospects what the view is like from their balcony. We can offer them multiple ways to take a tour. If you give them more control, you’ll win them over.”

Hood said Apartments.com has found that prospective residents prefer texting and chatting about 50 percent more now than they did pre-pandemic. 

About seven years ago, Wesson and UDR wanted to say ‘Yes’ even more to apartment demand. It shifted to an exclusively self-guided-tours approach to marketing. 

“This enabled us to more than double the number of tours that took place,” Wesson said.

Full, in-person, guided tours were taking about an hour on average, and self-guided are only about 17 minutes. 

“We became self-sufficient for our customers,” Wesson said. “We reduced customer friction.”

The move also helped UDR create happier associates. “When you have people doing a job they don’t like, there is higher turnover,” Wesson said.

“By redesigning leasing positions, for example, we took away some of the stress by automated tasks such as providing basic information to prospects.”

Wesson said the time from start to finish in the application to lease process was reduced by 17 percent.

More Interesting Points:

Renter prospects aren’t wanting to tour on certain days, with 12 percent to 20 percent of tours being set on any given day of the week. 

Marketing to prospects mostly through automation leads to faster decisions. “We’re seeing that 72 percent of renters include only one to three communities in their overall search,” Hood said.

The average time it takes from initial search to leasing has shrunk from 46 days two years ago to 32 days now, according to Apartments.com.

Wesson said that leasing became more of a transactional event than a relationship-based one, and our customers were okay with that.

“Having bots answer prospects’ questions the same way, every time, based on how we program them means a lot more quality control. 

“Believe it or not, residents will fact-check what the bot tells them about price or details against what we have online, and they don’t even know that the bot is getting the same info from our website.”

Mollenido addressed that AI today is everywhere, especially on your smartphone. “Sometimes you don’t even realize it’s turned on,” he said. “With something like ChatGPT, it’s not replacing our staff, it’s helping them to do their jobs better.”

Mollenido said in terms of marketing, “It used to be that we [consumers] looked for ads, now the ads look for us.”