QUICK SUMMARY // Multifamily marketing in today’s world is challenging, but this guide makes it easy. Using insights from 85,000 leases, we reveal how renters find apartments in 2025 and the core marketing tools you need to turn more apartment shoppers into happy residents.
Introduction
You're about to pack up when the email arrives. "What's going on with this property in Houston?"
You check the dashboard and see that a few more notices came in. Just great. Now, its occupancy is below 87%. Phone calls and website visits continue their downward trajectory. That ILS package increase last month isn't doing enough.
You're not sure where to even begin. Is it me? Is it our rent price? Is the on-site staff struggling?
Meanwhile, you've spent all day setting up pay-per-click ads for another property in Tampa. Learning to set up campaigns and budgets took way too long, and though you could publish the ads, you have no idea if they will work.
It feels like each day, you don't know what fire you will have to put out next. Occupancies are constantly changing, your marketing strategy is all over the place, and you're stuck doing time-consuming tasks that prevent you from diagnosing and fixing problems faster.
If you're looking for a reliable apartment marketing strategy that can be applied to every property and make your role much more manageable, you're in the right place.
In this multifamily marketing guide, we share insights from 85,000 leases to reveal how renters find apartments in 2025 and the core marketing tools you need to stay ahead of your communities' ever-changing occupancy and fill those vacancies faster.
What is Multifamily Marketing?
The purpose of multifamily marketing is to showcase an apartment community's units, amenities, location, pricing, and lifestyle to attract target renters searching for a place to live. While marketing’s primary goal is to generate qualified leads and increase occupancy, it’s also critical for retaining current residents, improving a community's reputation, and achieving better revenue outcomes.
How Can a Better Apartment Marketing Plan Help My Portfolio?
Many elements determine the success of your apartment portfolio, but marketing is one of the most critical.
A struggling apartment marketing strategy forces you to:
❌ Charge lower rental rates to avoid more vacancies.
❌ Pay higher costs to attract renters.
❌ Lose visibility to competitors.
But an excellent apartment marketing plan allows you to:
✅ Attract more qualified renters, maintain higher occupancy levels, and improve profitability.
✅ Establish an online presence and reputation that stands apart from other properties.
✅ Justify charging higher rents and adjust pricing based on demand by leveraging revenue management.
The first step in ensuring your apartment marketing strategy puts your portfolio in an excellent position in 2025 is understanding exactly how today’s renters shop for apartments.
How Renters Find Apartments in 2025
For years, apartment operators and marketers have struggled to pinpoint prospective renters' journeys from discovering their community to signing a lease. But this information is nearly impossible to narrow down.
Each renter has individual needs, timelines, and preferred places to seek information about specific communities. As we'll discuss next, some places are more critical than others for apartment marketers.
To better understand the renter's journey, focus on 'how' they decide. No matter where or when renters discover communities, everyone will go through four stages during their search: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention.
These stages comprise the Leasing Funnel, which is the best framework for explaining how renters find apartments in 2025.
The Leasing Funnel Framework
The Awareness Stage
Renters begin to explore communities that meet their criteria. This search often starts with location and price as primary factors but will include other considerations like bed count, square footage, and community amenities. Typically, they start this stage by using navigational apps like Google Maps, customizing ILS filters to discover apartments in their desired areas, or entering relevant keywords into Google to find communities.
The Consideration Stage
The potential renter has identified a couple of apartments that best suit their needs and will begin to evaluate them further. Though they may already have visited your community website before this point, it's safe to assume that they'll review it again, watch a walkthrough video tour of the floorplan they're interested in, learn more about your community's features, and check to see if you have any availability for their desired move-in timeframe. They'll also look for online reviews and explore your social media pages.
The Decision Stage
After discovering and researching the various apartment communities that fit their needs, prospective renters will finally evaluate the places they're most interested in. They're confident enough to call the leasing office, schedule an in-person tour, and apply to lease online. They may complete these actions for one or two communities. Still, in the end, it is at this stage where one finalist emerges, and that largely depends on the service and communication they receive while touring or interacting with that community during the lease signing process.
The Retention Stage
The final stage focuses on the residents' living experience in your community. To increase the chance they will renew their lease, their experience must match the expectations promised in your marketing. By ensuring you're following through on those basic expectations, you can avoid more vacancies. This also solidifies your community's reputation among future renters since positive experiences produce more positive online reviews.
Following the Leasing Funnel framework in your apartment marketing strategy will help you guide prospective renters throughout their decision-making process, positioning your apartments favorably throughout each stage.
The Leasing Funnel
Where Renters Convert From Leads To Leases
To help you better understand where to focus your marketing efforts in 2025, we analyzed over 85,000 leases using phone call tracking software from the past three years. Though phone calls are only quantified as last-touch attribution, which doesn't account for the full leasing journey, the data overwhelmingly shows some marketing sources are better at converting leads to leases than others.
These Are The Apartment Marketing Sources That Gain The Most Lead-To-Lease Conversions (According To 85,000+ Leases)
- Community Website (40,481 leases)
- Google Business Profile (25,138)
- Google Ads (5,166)
- Apartments.com (3,402)
- Zillow (2,322)
- CoStar (1,432)
- Apartment List (1,319)
- Corporate Website (926)
Some other notable marketing sources of note we tracked in our study included RentPath (573), Apartment Guide (449), Rent.com (366), RentCafe (286), and Facebook (75).
Lead to Lease Conversions
Apartment marketers who utilize a community website, Google Ads, and Google Business Profile possess the most powerful lead and lease engine. In our study, this trio of marketing sources attributed to 83% of leases signed! Meanwhile, Internet Listing Services like Apartments.com, Zillow, and others play a secondary role.
Core Apartment Marketing Tools Needed To Stand Out In 2025
Our study above matched leases to 88 marketing sources using phone call conversions. Prospective renters discover and engage with apartment communities in various ways, but that doesn't mean casting a wide net is the most effective way to market your apartments.
Ultimately, apartment marketing's primary purpose is to lease units. The data identifies the core marketing tools your portfolio of apartments should utilize in 2025 to fulfill its purpose.
Below is a summary of those core apartment marketing tools you will need to turn interested prospects into happy renters.
1. Community Website
Your apartment community website should be the foundation of your entire marketing strategy. It is a 24/7 digital storefront for your communities and their units, providing virtual tours to prospective renters. It’s the main source of truth about your apartment and will, by far, be your best source of qualified leads.
Your website needs three essential elements to fulfill its role: floorplan-specific pages, clear calls-to-action, and a positive user experience.
Floorplan-Specific Pages
Renters know their floorplan needs before starting their search. You need pages on your community website dedicated to each floorplan detailing rents, availability, amenities, relevant information, and specific photos and walkthrough video tours.
- How floorplan-specific apartment marketing helps combat vacancy
- What do renters demand from your apartment marketing plan?
Clear Calls-to-Action
Making clear calls-to-action, like 'Apply Now' or 'Schedule a Tour,' at key positions throughout your website is necessary for capturing leads at the most opportune moment, especially after an interested renter engages with a floorplan page and its media content.
- Is your apartment website converting leads to leases?
- Don't Miss a Single Lead: Conquer 24/7 Leasing with These Apartment Website Tweaks
Positive User Experience
The best apartment websites are designed with prospective (and current) renters in mind. Mobile responsiveness, clear navigation, and accessibility are not just benefits; they're necessary to ensure renters have an easy experience with your website, boosting your community's credibility.
- How to build renters' trust in your apartment marketing strategy
- Website Accessibility Guide For Multifamily Marketers
- Apartment Shoppers Expect Mobile-Friendly Websites
But, of course, you could have a great apartment website that accomplishes little unless you're driving renters to it. That's why you don't just need this following tool; it's a must-have.
2. Digital Advertising
With digital apartment ads, you can target in-market renters and drive more qualified traffic to your website by increasing visibility for your available floorplans, amenities, and lifestyle across all major online platforms.
For everything you need to know to make this critical element of your community's marketing strategy work in 2025, check out our Complete Guide to Digital Advertising for Apartments. In it, you will learn how digital advertising works, various ad types and campaigns that attract renters, how to set your budget, and how to know if your ads work.
More digital apartment advertising resources:
- Explainer: Google Ads for Apartments
- How much do multifamily PPC ads cost? You might be surprised.
- How Dynamic Apartment Ads Improve Your Leasing Velocity
- Keyword Research for Multifamily: Boost your Google Ads by Choosing the Best Keywords for Your Apartments!
- In-House vs. Outsourced: What's Best for Multifamily PPC?
3. High-Quality Walkthrough Video Tours and Photos
For your website to convert and become a 24/7 leasing machine, it must feature high-quality and attractive apartment walkthrough video tours and photos showing the inside of your units and amenities so renters can tour your communities from anywhere.
Renters are savvy and can notice when photos or videos were taken with a digital camera a decade ago. Subpar media will hurt your leasing ability and make renters assume (wrongly or not) that their living experience will also be subpar. There's a powerful connection between the quality of your media content and the perception renters have of your apartments.
The appearance of your apartment's photos and videos is critical in helping you differentiate your property from competitors. If you haven't addressed or updated your media content in a while, that will be a huge agenda item in 2025.
4. Google Business Profile & Local SEO
As more renters turn to location-based apps, like Google Maps, to conduct their apartment search, honing in on your local SEO channels can give your community more visibility at this critical stage.
The most notable local SEO channel is your Google Business Profile, which gives renters quick and vital information about your apartment community. It includes a link to your community's website, physical address, directions, phone number, leasing office hours, photos, and reviews.
The more complete and up-to-date your Google Business Profile is, the more likely it is to attract the right renters and boost leasing.
- Local Search Marketing for Multifamily Apartments: Boost Traffic From Your Google Business Profile
- How To Verify Your Apartment's Google Business Profile
While local SEO is most associated with your Google Business Profile, it impacts other widely-used channels like Google Maps and your online reviews. Let's break these elements down:
Google Maps
The content of your Google Business Profile ties directly into Google Maps, which prospective renters use to get directions to your community or perform a discovery search of apartments within specific geographic locations. Your apartments can stand out by incorporating location-specific messaging throughout your community website and leverage Google Maps advertising.
Online Reviews
Online reviews are heavily featured on your Google Business Profile. Reviews have always been critical, but it's a deal breaker for renters in 2025 who are seeking authenticity and want to hear what your residents say about their experience in your community. You need to have a process for soliciting honest reviews from your residents and ensure you're monitoring your review channels, responding to each review, and flagging ones that may appear fraudulent.
- Boost Your Apartments' Online Reviews By Turning Residents Into Promoters
- Expert Insights for Improving Your Apartment's Online Reputation
5. Revenue Management
In multifamily marketing, you cannot control place (your location is fixed) or product (unit availability changes constantly). But you do have control over your promotion (advertising) and price (rent). Unfortunately, many property management companies have siloed these aspects, losing the critical connection between pricing and marketing that can impact a community's performance.
Pricing and promotion must work together to adjust for supply (vacancy) and demand changes. An excellent revenue management product aligns your pricing and marketing strategies, enabling lease conversions, reduced marketing expenses, and optimized rent prices.
More apartment revenue management resources:
- Why Multifamily Revenue Management is More Than Just Pricing
- Why Multifamily Marketing and Rent Pricing Must Work Together
What Else Should Apartment Marketers Prioritize in 2025?
Already feel good about your list of core apartment marketing tools in 2025? Here are some other areas of your current marketing plan that you could improve in 2025.
Internet Listing Services
ILSs remain beneficial in creating general awareness for your apartments and are a go-to resource for many prospective renters early in their search process. But ILSs also list you alongside many competitors, making it harder to stand out unless you pay more on top of your already expensive contract, draining your marketing budget. In 2025, consider running PPC ad campaigns instead of paying for upgraded ILS packages, as that would help you better address changing leasing needs.
Social Media Presence
Organic posts on your apartment's social media feeds will likely not produce conversions, and that's okay. Their role is to show off your authentic side, highlighting your property and resident experience in a way that speaks to interested renters. Ensure you have an active presence in 2025; here are some examples of social media posts renters love for inspiration.
Email Marketing Strategy
Emails are still effective for multifamily marketers to nurture prospective renters and keep your apartments in mind. You can have ready-to-go emails sent automatically from your CRM after a prospect schedules a tour online or as follow-ups with relevant information that draws them closer to converting a lease. You can also segment your email audiences to send relevant updates, like newsletters to residents or price and unit availability to retargeting contacts.
Key Takeaways
- Focus On Your Core Marketing Tools: Our analysis of over 85,000 leases reveals that a community website, Google Ads, and Google Business Profile are the top sources driving lead-to-lease conversions, making them the core focus of every property's marketing strategy.
- Build A Strong Community Website Foundation: Your most effective tool for converting renters is a community website with floorplan-specific pages, high-quality media, clear calls to action, and a positive user experience.
- Connect with Qualified Renters On-Demand with Digital Ads: Platforms like Google and Facebook are essential for targeting renters and dynamically adjusting campaigns to meet your community's leasing needs.
- Consider Reducing Your ILS Spend: While ILSs help with initial awareness, they aren't the primary driver of conversions. Consider reducing reliance on ILSs in favor of marketing channels that drive more conversions at lower costs.
- Invest in High-Quality Media: Professional photos and videos significantly impact renter perceptions. Investing in high-quality media enhances your community’s presentation and can persuade prospects to choose your apartments.
Ready for a marketing plan that works?
From community websites to digital advertising to revenue management, RentVision has everything you need to complete your 2025 multifamily marketing plan. Get predictive, automated solutions designed to connect your apartments to the right renters before vacancy hits. >>> Fill Vacancies Faster