Centralized Apartment Leasing Offices Help Balance Head Count with Performance

A centralized leasing strategy can mean different things to different apartment management company models. What most in multifamily can agree on is that this potentially time and cost-saving approach continues to gain momentum as the apartment management industry further uses innovation to improve its operations.

The “resident experience” is something successful apartment companies have been aiming to perfect for years. The steady stream of new technological innovation is enabling this by driving incremental progress for operators, who can potentially upgrade their property management software platforms with single-point solutions.

Centralized leasing platforms are an emerging concept apartment companies can use to help their leasing teams optimize lead management and cost-effectively control headcount. By using them to cross-sell leases to prospects within their portfolios in a given market, they can potentially increase sales.

By using a renter-centric platform—one with its software architecture focused on the resident rather than the community—data (or guest cards) can be designed for individuals and individual units as they make their way through the renter journey, no matter how many properties they look at, on a single guest card rather than multiple guest cards tied to (multiple) individual properties.

Companies such as Funnel have capitalized on this approach, wanting to differentiate itself in this space and perhaps distance its customers from legacy property management software systems that have dominated the multifamily industry for decades. 

Giving Residents More Control

In February, Funnel raised $36.5 million in Series B funding. In its words, Funnel aims to be a disruptor in the legacy property management sector as it continues to build on its lead management capabilities by additionally working to develop a suite of products focused on renter onboarding, resident portal and retention. The company’s announcement included mention of a new category: renter management software, which they see as more relevant for their product set than the existing property management software category that dominates the industry. 

The preemptive round of fundraising was led by RET Ventures, a leading PropTech-focused VC firm and existing Funnel investor. It was joined by Camden Property Trust and Morgan Properties, two of the country’s largest owners of multifamily properties, as well as Wilshire Lane Capital, Trinity Ventures and Camber Creek.

RET Ventures’ partner, John Helm, said, “Our conversations with strategic investors have increasingly shown the need for a more streamlined leasing process that puts the prospective resident in control of the process and allows for self-touring, omni-channel communications and online leasing so that an apartment can be leased at any hour of the day at the prospective renter’s convenience.”

Significantly Reducing Marketing Spend

Kristy Simonette, Senior Vice President, Strategic Services, Camden, said her company uses Funnel as its “complete leasing platform. We leverage it as a CRM with marketing automation and a slick virtual leasing agent. It integrates nicely with our property management software (in this case, RealPage).”

She said the centralized leasing office (CLO) helps Camden to accurately capture and better act on all leads driven to the 159 Camden communities, totaling more than 59,000 apartment homes. 

“This alone allowed us to significantly reduce our marketing spend in 2021 and it allows Camden’s onsite teams to work across all Camden communities,” she said. “Each customer is tracked, all interactions are documented and organized for all Camden staff to see and understand the interactions (regardless of communication channel) of each customer’s journey.”

Capitalizing on Cross-Selling

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.

Simonette said previous CRM platform iterations were less efficient “and a bit clunky” when it came to sharing strong prospects and their data with a sister community in an instant.

Camden now uses the efficiencies created by its CLO by combining multiple communities to form what it calls “nests.” Because agents can easily work leads for multiple communities, Camden is “able to deploy resources where they are needed and when they are needed,” she said.

Simonette added, “With the automation, it takes less manpower to accomplish what we used to have to do 100 percent manually. This has opened up great possibilities for earning potential for our sales professionals as they can now sell across portfolios of communities. This has been a game-changer for us during this talent war we are all experiencing. We have leveraged the platform to the fullest and we have not missed a beat in covering higher-than-normal open positions.”

Simonette said the virtual agent used in Camden’s CLO is able to handle hundreds of simple interactions simultaneously. 

“This reduces the load on our contact center,” she said. “Also, the automated drip campaigns help our onsite staff by dripping marketing messages automatically and at the right time during the customer journey. Self-service scheduling for tours is also a big-time saver.

“This makes us available to provide great service to our residents. Our retention rates are super high; even though we cannot attribute all of this to CLO operations, we believe it plays a part because our onsite staff are less busy with the administration piece of managing the sales cycle.”

Funnel CEO Tyler Christiansen said, “By providing a simple, seamless and personalized renter journey, we help leading multifamily companies lease faster and more efficiently. For owners and operators on legacy property management systems feeling stuck between a bunch of disconnected point solutions, or giving up their trusted accounting systems, we have a better approach.”

Automating Mundane Tasks

Samantha McQuown, Vice President – Business Operations, Morgan Properties, said her company recently launched a second pilot program with Funnel having seen positive results in their first efforts.

“We can now more effectively manage a single prospect’s inquiries across multiple communities versus managing the same prospect multiple times across multiple communities individually by using this renter-centric solution,” McQuown said. “We have the capability to easily identify and track our prospects on their unique leasing journey across multiple Morgan Properties communities.”

She said her regional team has gained “tremendous efficiencies” within its lead management process. “Our sales team has been able to effectively communicate with and manage more leads in less time versus our standard model of CRM technology. We are excited to see this continued evolution.”

Centralized leasing platforms like Funnel’s automate mundane tasks and omni-channel communications to manage the entire renter journey. They use a natural language virtual leasing agent that works across SMS, email and chat to respond to inquiries and sort them appropriately based on their quality. 

Additionally, Funnel is rolling out an instant income verification tool that has been built on the backside of its platform and hidden from renter prospects. When prospects complete their leasing application, they are given a confidence score, which onsite teams can access to decide if the applicant is financially sound to be accepted. This removes steps typically taken by the leasing staff such as collecting and verifying documents such as W-2s, pay stubs, etc. It also removes the security and financial risk of accepting applicants who are falsifying their identities.

Essex is currently participating in Funnel’s online leasing tools program and Funnel said other clients would begin using this tool by mid-year.

The right CLO functionality can further improve the accuracy for listing syndication with major third-party ILS’ by including integrations that ensure information is correct and richer data is captured through inquiries.

When it comes to posting rental data on ILSs such as Apartments.com or Zillow, standard practice is for syndication platforms to use one software language for all sources, according to Funnel.

“Funnel has created a separate integration for posting to each source, and on a unit-by-unit basis within the community, which ensures that data posted is accurate,” Christiansen said.

CLOs are Not All or Nothing

According to a recent industry property management report by 20for20, Todd Katler, CEO, Anyone Home, said that many of the benefits of the fully-centralized model are available to operators who—for geographical or organizational reasons—cannot change their staffing models, at least in the short term.

Using on-demand labor can accommodate demand fluctuations better than individual agents assigned to individual properties, Katler said. Self-guided tours, in turn, lengthen touring hours and improve customer experience. And the automation of the process brings consistency to a characteristically inconsistent process. 

“Centralization is not an all-or-nothing proposition,” Katler said. “Whatever your business model or portfolio, there is a combination of on-demand labor and automation that will improve your efficiency and—crucially—your customer experience.”