If your leasing velocity is slow, it's easy to acknowledge a problem
Is Your Apartment’s Application Process to Blame for Vacancies?
🤕 Problems & symptoms of an applying process that’s way too difficult for renters
Your leasing velocity is slow.
Let’s reset and, again, look at the context of the typical resident lifecycle. Working backward to this point as you conduct your vacancy analysis, let’s assume that your renewals, resident satisfaction, and more are all in good shape.Â
Now, we’re getting into some real fundamentals—your marketing and leasing performance.
How quickly you can lease a unit obviously factors into your vacancy, and we know how important it is to most apartment communities since incentive structures are often designed toward achieving a fast leasing velocity.Â
So, if your leasing velocity is slow, it’s easy to acknowledge a problem. Units are vacant longer than necessary, contributing to poor property performance and lost revenue. The problem is obvious, but are you considering whether your application process is to blame?
You’re getting lots of website traffic and phone calls but no applications.
Here’s one example of why you must examine your application process to determine if it’s helping or hurting your performance.
The data on website traffic and the number of phone calls to your leasing office shows that you have plenty of demand to fill vacant units, but you’re just not getting many applications.
Is that due to your marketing strategy or the leasing team’s ability to close deals? It’s possible.Â
But the other area to look at is your community’s application process. It should be easy and seamless for someone genuinely interested in your apartments to apply in minutes.
Prospects who say they’re highly interested in your community don’t end up applying.
Suppose your application process requires someone to call over the phone to speak with someone (which terrifies more people than you may think) or drive to your leasing office to fill out paperwork in person.Â
In that case, you’re giving them more reasons not to apply—even if they genuinely are interested in your apartments.Â
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🤦🏼‍♂️ Common mistakes that make applying to rent harder than necessary
You’re not utilizing online applications.
The culprit in this instance is clear. Today’s renters want to fill out a lease application online without having to drive anywhere or talk to anyone.Â
🙌🏼 Best practices to improve the lease application process
Embed an online application into your website.
Any major multifamily property management software offers an online application portal that can integrate into your community’s website. That would be the easiest solution to the problem of not getting enough lease applications.Â
The other benefit of utilizing an online application is its impact on your community’s operation. Online applications make it easier for you to streamline the processing of applications (as well as apply resident screening technology) and increase leasing velocity.
Get an apartment website with up-to-date pricing and availability features.
Another essential for removing the barrier preventing interested prospects from applying is ensuring your website has up-to-date unit pricing and availability.Â
After all, no one will apply if they don’t know the actual price. No one will apply if they don’t know immediately that a unit they desire in the floorplan is available.Â
We’ll dive more into your website later, but we’re planting this seed now: Imagine if you want to buy a home, and you go to Zillow, but you don’t know if the house is available, and you don’t know the price. It seems unfathomable. Yet this basic information that everyone needs is, unfortunately, still missing from many apartment websites.Â
If you make pricing and availability easy for prospects to understand, they will feel much more comfortable taking the next step toward leasing. You can increase their confidence by adding digital site maps and walkthrough video tours to your website. Pair those critical pieces with an easy-to-use online application form; you’re off and running!
Source: RentVision
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