It’s already 2024 and with that comes another year of leasing smarter and faster than the one before. This year, your leasing strategies are going to carry more weight than ever as competition intensifies with new supply flooding the rental market. Despite the fears or anxieties this may provoke, just remember there is still the opportunity to end up on the top.
The theme of this year’s strategy? Every lead matters—even the ones that you might not normally consider high-value. Any lead missed or overlooked is almost guaranteed to be lost to a competing property. How do you ensure your teams can juggle that? How are you monitoring your goals and processes so they can evolve as needed in the competitive climate?
We’ve talked about your properties’ need for a leasing playbook before as it aligns your teams, keeps your goals front and center, and gives leads a set pathway from generation to move-in. Unlike previous years, there are some absolute non-negotiables for this year’s leasing playbook if you want to see any of your goals or budget met. Here’s what’s imperative for your 2024 leasing playbooks:
Your CRM should already be helping your teams organize tasks and follow-up with leads with an emphasis on timeliness and speed. But even more than that, how are you setting up your CRM to focus on high-value leads while also continuing to nurture and move low-value leads along?
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This is where your CRM needs one playbook to address two kinds of leads: high-value and low-value. You get to decide what distinguishes a high-value lead from a low-value lead, but most likely it will have to do with digital signals that show the level of intent they have to lease. These factors could include the amount of information a lead gives in a guest card or the marketing source that generated the lead.
Your CRM should score these leads based on their FIT (Financial budget, Interested unit type, and Time to move-in) and then assign to a high or low-value nurturing track. A high-value lead will likely garner most of your leasing agents’ attention, as they handle tasks to move leads toward signing a lease. However, you can also use strategic and automated marketing efforts such as personalized email and text messages to work in conjunction with your agents, too.
To ensure your teams can focus on high-value leads, you must also remove the workload of low-value leads through automation. As the low-value lead progresses through your leasing playbook, they can then graduate up to the high-value track for your leasing teams to convert.
To truly make the most of every lead, it could also make sense to create a third playbook or nurturing track for previous prospects and residents. By re-marketing to leads that were previously interested in your property, you may convert them back to a high-value lead as their current lease is likely ending again.
Quarterly, monthly and even weekly meetings need to be happening between supervisors and their teams. In short, it’s a way to keep preventative maintenance of your overall processes and projections at the forefront of your team’s mind. The biggest advantages your teams will have from these is understanding their personal and team KPIs, as well as the ability to propose ideas and adapt their processes due to unpredictable shifts in the leasing process. Whether it's adjusting strategies, redistributing marketing spend, or refining renter experiences, the conversations cultivated through regular meetings can highly impact your team’s productivity and efficiency in day-to-day operations.
Schedule these meetings as supervisors with your teams and have a goal in mind for these regular meetings. Maybe monthly meetings are going to be set for looking over the monthly and quarterly projections and how those are playing into the yearly goals. You can use those meetings to ask questions like:
Your weekly meetings could be the time when employees give feedback or ideas from their experiences This will enable teams to pool together different perspectives and firsthand testimonies, which can help both your leasing and marketing teams in tailoring and improving the overall experience for leads and renters. Being able to better curate leasing experiences only helps magnetize prospective renters.
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Being proactive with these meetings will become a consistently fruitful approach that can help support your teams in meeting KPIs throughout the entire year. This also takes away the chances of having a more reactive or impulsive response to problems that inevitably arise down the line.
The goal is securing every potential lead. But this demands a strategic approach grounded in data-driven insights and efficient team practices. Building foolproof leasing strategies involves a true examination of past data to discern critical gaps and optimize the effectiveness of leasing agents and their teams.
Take a hard look at previous data. Analyze lead conversion rates, identify bottlenecks in the leasing process, and pinpoint areas where opportunities slipped through the cracks. Your data should be able to help answer these questions:
This is where you can refine and optimize your processes ahead of time. Inevitably, there will be snags and room for improvement along the way, but that is also where your regular meetings can help bring teams together. The more proactive and prepared you are going into leasing season, the more you are going to find success at the end of the fiscal year.
With these nonnegotiables in your leasing playbook and strategies, you will gain the trust and confidence of your teams to remain forward-thinking and prepared for the competition so that you can optimize success in the long run.
Interested in how you can make your leasing smarter in 2024? Let’s chat.
If you’re interested in leasing smarter with Anyone Home, BOOK A DEMO to learn more.
