The lead to lease lifecycle is being automated more and more in 2023 within multifamily and apartment marketing. The top concern I am hearing is where do we draw the line between automation and human outreach? What is the newly defined job of the onsite team for follow up with all these new automation tools?
The real answer here is that it is different for each property. Different markets, different demographics, different tech stacks, different staffing capacities, and about a hundred other factors all play a role here in discovering what the right mix of human and automation is in your lead to lease workflow.
Lead to Lease with Short Staffed Teams
If you are like many other properties out there right now suffering from short staffed onsite teams, more automation is *probably better. Onsite teams have a million jobs but residents walking into the office almost always takes top priority. When you have short staffed onsite teams they often become reactive, dealing with the day as it comes, and admin tasks often fall through the cracks.
Following up with prospects in the lead to lease cycle, chasing down rent payments, working on renewals, all these things often fall off the todo list for short staffed onsite teams.
By automating most if not all these things, your onsite teams can have time to give great tours, create personal relationships with residents, and focus on keeping the community beautiful.
Lead to Lease in Competitive Markets
We have seen one of the greatest increase of supplies in the past few decades this year. With so many new units being delivered to market things and the slow down in rent increases, renewals are becoming more important than ever and bringing in new residents is getting tougher and tougher.
Automation doesn’t only save time for onsite teams in the lead to lease cycle. Automation also means getting better content delivered on the optimal channel. A good automation solution will identify what a prospect cares about most, dynamically create that content, and deliver it to them where they want it (e.g. text message).
Apartment Renewals as a Focus in 2023
We are seeing concessions rise and renewals drop. In addition to this, we are seeing rent prices level out and even fall from the spike in 2021. These facts combined have made renewals a primary focus for owners and operators in 2023. With the already overflowing plates of onsite teams, creating a great renewal experience for residents can be difficult. Often times we find onsite teams being reactive, sending renewal notices at the 11th hour, and just hoping folks renew.
Leveraging automation here can ensure you create a delightful experience for residents from the day they sign their lease. When residents are satisfied from day 1, they have a year of good experiences to look back on and drive them toward a renewal.
With automation doing the heavy lifting onsite teams can focus on building relationship and community, which will further the desire to renew even more.
Conclusion
There is no right answer on what the perfect mix is between automation and human touch. This is because each property is different and has different needs. The first step to finding the right mix for you is to identify the pain points you are solving for. Once you have that, you can figure out what tool is right for your property and what tasks are best done by your onsite team.