Whether you're gearing up for peak leasing season or managing year-round turnover, your apartment’s digital ads must be ready before leases expire.
Your ads need time to work, drive traffic, and generate leads so that when a resident moves out, there's already demand for their unit.
If you start advertising only after vacancies arise, it's too late.
You must time your ads around upcoming lease expirations to maximize your leasing success. Here’s why.
What Happens When You Wait Too Long to Advertise Apartments
Delayed ads = delayed leases.
Peak leasing season brings a whirlwind of activity—U-Haul vans in the parking lot, a surge of tours, and the excitement of welcoming new residents. But this busy period also comes with high stakes: You need to fill units fast while demand is at its highest.
The problem? The renters fueling this demand started searching weeks ago. If your ads weren't live beforehand, you lost crucial time generating interest in your community. Digital ads don’t produce instant results—building momentum for specific floorplans can take weeks.
If you only increase advertising after vacancies hit, your leasing velocity will slow down at the worst possible time. Longer vacancy durations mean higher costs, and your community could take months to recover.
Last-minute ads cost more and work less.
Every campaign requires time to optimize—platforms like Google and Meta need data to learn which keywords, ad messaging, images, and bids perform best in reaching your target audience and driving traffic to your website. Launching ads in advance ensures they are at peak efficiency when your units become available.
If you wait until vacancies arise, your ads will be less effective. Getting traffic and leads from them faster will require a much higher budget. This reactive approach forces you to spend more while achieving less—a bad combination for any marketing strategy.
Reactive ads lead to unnecessary revenue losses.
When demand is at its highest, you should be able to raise rents—not discount them.
But if your marketing efforts weren’t prepared in advance, you may feel pressured to lower rents or offer unnecessary concessions to keep occupancy targets on track.
A well-timed advertising strategy ensures that renters are already considering your community when leases expire—allowing you to maintain strong pricing instead of scrambling to fill units with discounts.
Your Lease Expiration Data Holds the Key to Better-Timed Ads
Most standard leases at conventional properties are 12, 15, or 18 months, making expiration trends easy to track. Stay on top of this data in your property management software to anticipate upcoming vacancies.
You can also take these steps to determine your apartment's unique seasonality to identify peak periods of demand and slower leasing months. (If your seasonality and lease expirations don't align, that's a major issue!)
By knowing both, you can predict changes to demand weeks or months in advance, giving you time to set up, reconfigure, and turn 'on' your digital ads proactively—so when leases expire, new renters are already lined up.
How to Optimize Your Ad Campaigns for Lease Expirations
1. Build ad campaigns for each floorplan.
Create separate ad campaigns for each floorplan or bedroom count. Lease expirations usually affect different areas of your community, allowing for better targeting and messaging tailored to renters searching for specific unit types.
Example: Mentioning '1-bedroom apartments' in your ad copy for your 1-bedroom floorplan’s campaign makes it more relevant and improves performance.
2. Focus on the best-performing ad channel.
If you have many expirations coming up, emphasize high-performing ad channels. Google Ads is ideal because it allows you to target high-intent search terms (i.e., '1-bedroom apartments in Omaha').
3. Use urgency to drive faster leasing.
If a specific floorplan has a high number of upcoming expirations, increase your ad spend just for that floorplan's campaign, which will drive more traffic to it before leases end. More visibility now means fewer vacant units later.
Use urgency-focused messaging in your ads, like 'Pre-Lease Now!' or 'Only a Few Units Left!' Avoid vague terms like 'Now Leasing' that lack a clear call to action.
The Takeaway: Be Proactive, Not Reactive
If you ramp up your digital advertising efforts only after vacancies increase, you're already behind—and that can negatively impact your ads' performance, leasing, and revenue for months.
But if you carefully plan to have your ads ready and 'on' before leases expire, you'll get the most impact, avoiding longer vacancies, growing revenue, and improving community performance year-round.
Want to ensure your ads are always ahead of upcoming vacancies? With Predictive Advertising by RentVision, you'll never fall behind lease expirations because your campaigns automatically adjust to drive traffic where it’s needed most.