Are you looking for ways to make your apartment community more efficient and effective? This is Part 7 of our Apartment Vacancy Analysis series, which will help you find and fix the gaps across the marketing and leasing chain, and offers practical strategies and tools to help take your apartment community to the next level! Access the full table of contents available below.
You can see a lot of foot traffic through your leasing office, so you're doing an excellent job of attracting prospective residents and getting them to visit your apartments in person. Yet if that success isn't translating to more leases, then there's a significant problem.
On the other hand, there's no foot traffic. There can be multiple problems in play, and it's dismaying when you have lingering vacancies but not enough tour volume to improve occupancy.
So, what's causing your lack of tour volume? There are apparent marketing issues that could be to blame, which we'll focus on in the next article of this series.
But one specific area you may want to evaluate is the process of scheduling a tour of your apartment community and ask, 'Is it easy for someone interested in my community to come to see it in person?'
You may unintentionally be making it more difficult than necessary for someone to schedule a tour. We've already identified by this point the need for an online scheduling tool that lets prospects choose a time that works best for them to visit your community—but that's just the start.
It could also be more challenging to tour your community when you're not adequately staffed to help schedule or conduct tours, which leaves you offering only a limited number of showing times.
Whether you have the correct number of staff and scheduling options to promote touring is irrelevant if tours aren't conducted properly. This is where leasing agent performance directly impacts your ability to control vacancy.
Your agents must be trained to close because prospects are usually in the final stage of the leasing funnel when they decide to tour.
On top of that, your agents must exhibit excellent customer service and communication, highlight the unit's amenities and benefits, have accurate pricing and move-in time ready, and, most importantly, boldly ask for the close!
Again, removing the barriers to contacting your apartment community will help prevent great opportunities from slipping through the cracks.
It should be seamless for someone who wants to reach out and schedule a tour; they're your most qualified lead, and getting them to see your property in person and providing a high level of service during their tour will consistently produce good results.
You must deeply understand your ideal renter persona and ensure your touring options align with their preferences.
If you conclude that your renter demographic prefers a self-guided leasing experience, you should include self-guided touring options in your leasing strategy.
That being said, it's easy to fall into the trap of wanting to be trendy and centralizing leasing or offering self-guided options because that's what others are doing.
Your touring process must be what's best for you and your renters. If your demographic prefers interacting with a leasing agent during their tour, investing time and resources into self-guided options won't make sense.
Leasing is a 24/7/365 enterprise these days, so you need to make it possible for prospective residents to tour your apartment community from the comfort of their couch.
It's past time to put virtual touring options on your community website. Specifically, you need walkthrough video tours that give prospects what they want: the ability to see the inside of a unit in the specific floorplan they want to rent!
With walkthrough video tours, you can better-qualify leads before they ever step on site. They'll already have seen enough of your apartments online and determined that your community perfectly fits their needs.
Renting apartments is easier for you and your prospective residents when your community website features floorplan-specific visual content. From walkthrough video tours to photo galleries showing the inside of units, you can streamline leasing by letting prospects tour your community without driving there.
➡️ Next page: Do you have enough 'good' leads to improve apartment leasing?
Complete Apartment Vacancy Analysis Series
Introduction: What's causing your apartment's vacancy? Here's how to find & fix it
Part 2: Is your apartment's renewals strategy causing more vacancy?
Part 3: Are your residents satisfied with their experience at your apartments?
Part 4: Are you accruing excess vacancy loss after units lease?
Part 5: Are you properly vetting your apartment's lease applications?
Part 6: Is your apartment's application process to blame for vacancies?
Part 7: Are your apartment tours helping overcome vacancy?
Part 8: Do you have enough 'good' leads to improve apartment leasing?
Part 9: Is your apartment website converting leads to leases?
Part 10: How qualified is the traffic to your apartment website?
Part 11: What about pricing?! How rents affect your apartment's performance