Are you looking for ways to make your apartment community more efficient and effective? This is Part 7 of our Apartment Vacancy Analysis series, which will help you find and fix the gaps across the marketing and leasing chain, and offers practical strategies and tools to help take your apartment community to the next level! Access the full table of contents available below.
🤕 Problems & symptoms of less than stellar apartment tours
You get lots of tours but no leases.
You can see a lot of foot traffic through your leasing office, so you're doing an excellent job of attracting prospective residents and getting them to visit your apartments in person. But your tour-to-lease conversion rates are dismal—and you have vacancies lingering longer than necessary.
Or you're just not getting a lot of tours, period.
On the other hand, there's no foot traffic. There can be multiple problems in play, including marketing—which we'll focus on in the next article of this series.
🤦🏼♂️ Common mistakes that lead to unsuccessful in-person tours
You're making it more difficult for prospective residents to tour.
Evaluate the process of scheduling a tour of your apartment community and ask, 'Is it easy for someone interested in my community to come to see it in person?'
If you don't have online scheduling options or virtual tours that let renters see your apartments online beforehand, then the answer is yes (plus you're also missing great opportunities to pre-qualify leads.)
The process of setting up a tour must be as easy as purchasing a product on Amazon. But if you're expecting prospects to call or email to schedule a tour—not only are you giving them multiple extra steps, you're slowing down your leasing velocity as your staff tries to arrange tour times.
You'll have to figure out if you're adequately staffed, which showing times you'll offer, or even if you have a unit ready for showing in a floorplan that a prospect's interested in touring.
It also puts a huge amount of pressure on in-person tours to be successful—yet we all know that expecting every tour to result in a lease conversion isn't a smart strategy.
On-site tours aren't being conducted properly.
Whether you have the correct number of staff and scheduling options to promote touring is irrelevant if tours aren't conducted properly.
This isn't exactly groundbreaking, but your agents must:
- exhibit excellent customer service,
- listen to what the prospect needs and make them feel at ease,
- communicate effectively before, during, and after a showing,
- highlight the unit's amenities and benefits most relevant to the prospect,
- have accurate pricing and move-in time ready,
- and, most importantly, boldly ask for the close!
If tours aren't resulting to lease, take the time to evaluate leasing agent performance to discover if there are any breakdowns in the tour process that need improvement.
🙌🏼 Best practices to ensure your apartment tours produce more leases
Adopt online tour scheduling. (And answer the phone!)
Again, removing the barriers to contacting your apartment community will help prevent great opportunities from slipping through the cracks. That means letting renters schedule their in-person tour online, and making it a priority to answer the phone.
The goal is to make it easy for someone to reach out and schedule a tour; they're your most qualified lead, and getting them to see your property in person and providing a high level of service during their tour will consistently produce good results.
Put walkthrough video tours on your community website.
Leasing is a 24/7/365 enterprise these days, so you need to make it possible for prospective residents to tour your apartment community from the comfort of their couch.
It's past time to put virtual touring options on your community website. Specifically, you need walkthrough video tours that give prospects what they want: the ability to see the inside of a unit in the specific floorplan they want to rent!
With walkthrough video tours, you can better-qualify leads before they ever step on site. They'll already have seen enough of your apartments online and determined that your community perfectly fits their needs.
The result? An increase in tour-to-lease conversions and more time spent on tours with renters who are ready to lease.
🛠 Tools to help you improve your apartments' touring process and convert more leads to leases
Give showings 24/7 with RentVision's virtual tours.
Renting apartments is easier for you and your prospective residents when your community website features floorplan-specific visual content. From walkthrough video tours to photo galleries showing the inside of units, you can streamline leasing by letting prospects tour your community without driving there.
➡️ Next page: Do you have enough 'good' leads to improve apartment leasing?
Complete Apartment Vacancy Analysis Series
Introduction: What's causing your apartment's vacancy? Here's how to find & fix it
Part 2: Is your apartment's renewals strategy causing more vacancy?
Part 3: Are your residents satisfied with their experience at your apartments?
Part 4: Are you accruing excess vacancy loss after units lease?
Part 5: Are you properly vetting your apartment's lease applications?
Part 6: Is your apartment's application process to blame for vacancies?
Part 7: Are your apartment tours helping overcome vacancy?
Part 8: Do you have enough 'good' leads to improve apartment leasing?
Part 9: Is your apartment website converting leads to leases?
Part 10: How qualified is the traffic to your apartment website?
Part 11: What about pricing?! How rents affect your apartment's performance