Have you ever experienced that moment of panic when you realize your PMS, website, chatbot, and ILS listings are all showing different rent prices?
If so, you’re not alone.
The root of the issue? Apartment rent prices aren’t stored in just one place. Instead, different platforms pull from other sources, and not always at the same time. When your revenue management software updates rents, it might not show up on your different platforms for hours or even days.
But the good news? This is fixable. In this blog, we’ll break down why these pricing mismatches happen, how they impact your leasing performance, and what you can do to prevent them.
Why Rent Pricing Gets Out of Sync
Two primary issues could be causing your rent prices to be mismatched.
You have too many prices stored in your PMS.
Most multifamily property management systems include multiple pricing fields—base rent, market rent, effective rent, scheduled rent, imported rent, and even manual overrides.
The more price fields stored per unit, the greater the risk that your website, chatbot, or ILS API might pull from the wrong one.
The timing of price updates between platforms is off.
Even if your integrations are set to pull from the correct pricing field, timing still matters.
A classic example is when your revenue management software pushes new pricing into the PMS at 6 a.m., but your chatbot refreshes at 1 a.m. As a result, it’s always displaying yesterday’s rent.
The Impact of Mismatched Rent Prices to Renters and Leasing
You can't afford to ignore whatever issue is behind your mismatched rent prices.
Eventually, your prospects will notice that your rents are inconsistent somewhere along the line—and when that happens, your leasing team will have to work harder to verify the right price and regain their trust.
Price is an essential factor impacting every prospect's decision-making process. If there’s confusion around rent amounts, it creates unnecessary friction, missed leads, and lost leases.
How to Get Your Rent Prices Back in Alignment
Try these three things:
1. Audit rent pricing across all platforms.
Even if you haven’t experienced a pricing issue yet, now’s the time to review rent prices across your PMS, website, online application portal, chatbot, ILS listings, and more.
Use this audit as an opportunity to document where each platform pulls its pricing and build a repeatable checklist to catch mismatches before your renters do.
2. Check your API settings.
Next, review your API integrations. What pricing field is each platform pulling from? Is it the right one?
This is also a good time to clean up outdated or unused pricing fields in your PMS to avoid confusion down the line.
3. Understand sync schedules and adjust if necessary.
Finally, understand exactly when each platform syncs pricing updates to spot any lags, and work to minimize that gap to adjust sync updates wherever possible.
For example, we push prices to our client's websites as needed and check if there are any mismatches four times per day. When there is, we'll push updates again to avoid any issues. Other vendors may only pull pricing from a PMS to the website once per day.
The key is to ensure that when prices are pulled, whether to sync the website or other platforms, that it doesn't lead to situations where outdated pricing from days ago are still being shown.
One Extra Step: Learn how RentVision Revenue Management improves trust in apartment rent pricing.
RentVision Revenue Management is the most transparent rent pricing tool built for multifamily. It doesn't depend on market or competitor data, and helps both you and your renters understand precisely how each unit’s price is set.
Plus, it only pushes pricing updates once weekly and in small, incremental amounts to reduce leasing friction—unlike legacy systems that make multiple price changes daily, leading to issues with pricing misalignment across platforms.
Schedule a demo to learn how RentVision Revenue Management makes apartment pricing simple and trustworthy.