Apartment Managers Pivot to Centralized Leasing Technology

Centralized leasing is a concept that was slowly building momentum prior to the pandemic. 

A property management approach that can save money, time and effort, it frees leasing professionals to focus more on the most critical responsibilities they have when serving residents.

Some property management operators are finding that this makes sense in today’s world of advanced technology, hiring challenges and shortened renter prospect sales cycles.

Development toward a centralized leasing approach was taking place at several management companies and software service providers before the pandemic. But then, adapting to the restrictive COVID-19 way of the world, the apartment industry was forced to pivot in a way they had never done before.

Some say that in 2020 the apartment industry advanced 10 years’ worth of technological capability in 100 days. By doing so, onsite teams, already short-staffed and overworked, applauded.

The Comforts of ‘New and Improved’ Technology

Cross-selling has always been a worthy approach to use when leasing agents determine that prospects might be happier living at another nearby community in their portfolio. When there is a connection with a qualified renter, the sales team doesn’t want to lose them. Last month, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform re-engineered by Knock launched that uniquely streamlines this process.

Previous CRM platforms available were less efficient and a bit clunky when it came to sharing strong prospects and their data with a sister community in an instant.

Noah Echols is Vice President of Marketing at Carroll Management, which is based in Atlanta. The company operates 30,000 apartment homes across 85 properties nationally.

“We were developing our own centralized leasing process before the pandemic and then when COVID-19 hit, it just expedited the process,” Echols says. “At that point, we had to. Onsite leasing was shutting down. We saw such enormous success in this approach that we’ve since rolled it out across our portfolio permanently.”

Carroll Management had a centralized team in place to handle the top-of-funnel functions, but its employees all had to toggle back and forth between different accounts for each property. It had phone trees in place, but that whole process wasn’t as smooth as it could be.

Bumping Up Performance Metrics

With an AI tool it built to sort through leads at the very top of the funnel, Carroll Management’s centralized team manages all leads across channels directly to generate more tours for less money. 

“We saw an instant 10-point bump in our prospect to visit ratio and a 5-point bump on average in visit to application since onsite teams were freed up to focus on the people in front of them,” Echols says.

Echols said in recent months he’s noticing a big move by the apartment industry to centralized leasing.

“There are huge cost savings in centralizing parts of the onsite activity,” he says. “We can dedicate less expense to resources for leasing tasks and focus more on resident experience. It’s a win for everyone.”

Echols says call centers have “tried to do something similar in the industry for a long time, but their lack of a connection to the local property limited their ability to drive positive results. This in-house method allows us to scale lead management tasks without the need of expensive and less-effective third-parties.”

Carroll Management, too, is in the process of remaking its leasing professionals’ job into a more comprehensive relationship with the prospects.

“We’re moving toward our leasing team conducting the tour, handling the application and then the onboarding to the apartment home, all from our centralized leasing office,” he says. “This is more along the lines of how it’s done with a real estate agent and single-family homes.

“And AI continues to help us to answer the prospect’s most common questions early on such as rent amount, availability and the application. Humans handle the more complicated questions.

Complementing the Apt Company’s Brand

A centralized relocation department is something GSC Apartments created and has operated effectively for the past nine years. 

“The purpose of our relocation department is to complement our brand by establishing an exceptional first impression in managing incoming calls, drive traffic to our on-site teams either virtually or in person, and assist prospects in getting to the application process faster,” GSC Apartments’ Marketing Director Morgan Ellis says.

A concept many in the industry have considered and debated, Ellis speaks proudly of how it has helped the leasing teams perform, giving them time to focus on residents and prospect visits in the leasing offices.

For GSC, the Richmond, Va.-based company with 20,000 units and 60 communities spread over five states improves many workflows, including the referral cross-selling process. When prospects contact a GSC property, our platform presents the leasing professional with the latest availability, pricing, touring schedule, amenities and other features of the community in seconds.

Aimee Worthy, Assistant Director, Apartment Information Services at GSC, said, “The amount of time this saves our team—and the prospect——is impressive because we don’t have to open multiple website pages, windows or forms and re-enter information, or really, even pick up the phone to call a sister property.”

Since June, the company has seen a 25 percent increase in prospect visits who were forwarded internally through the cross-sell feature. Its relocation department’s “time on the phone” has been reduced from an average of 10 to 11 minutes per prospect to about five or six.

The prospect’s guest card is also easily transferable, saving team members at both communities from extra or duplicative work. 

“Any communications history that has been captured is preserved,” Worthey says. “It combines the info from one prospect who might have filled out multiple guest cards onto one, single guest card. The system helps us to identify the lead’s source. No longer do we have to rely on manual source tracking.”

And gone is the need for the leasing team to pick up heavy phone handsets, Worthey says. Its system now allows for calls in and out that are managed through the employee’s desktop computer.

“We simply click buttons on the screen and begin speaking,” she says. “The caller ID displays the person who is calling and the property they are interested in, as well as their guest card information, which allows for a more “personalized” call. There is instant connectivity to the API.”