This is the third part of a blog series written by RentVision Founder & CEO, David Watson, about gaining control over your future vacancy. You can read Part I, "How to Predict Your Future Vacancy", here. Part II, "How to Determine Your Apartments' Future Occupancy Target", is available here.

In my last two posts in this blog series, I introduced our new occupancy metrics:

Future Occupancy Projection.
Future Occupancy Target.

Your Future Occupancy Projection is predictive in that it accounts for both move-ins and move-outs, helping you know weeks in advance when a change in vacancy will occur. Future Occupancy Target then uses your community's unique seasonality to set a realistic goal to measure your Future Occupancy against. 

If your Future Occupancy falls below your Future Target, you know you have a problem. Fortunately, you're in good shape when this occurs because you are seeing a future problem rather than reacting to it. But how do you fix it?

In this blog, I'll review the importance of automated solutions and how you should use them as a shortcut to quickly get your Future Occupancy Projection back to your Future Occupancy Target.

Why "Automated" Solutions?

In most instances, your vacancy issue is uncontrollable. For example, the market you're in can fluctuate from month-to-month through no fault of your own, causing your Future Occupancy to fall below your Future Target. 

Or, we've also seen instances where a community has too many leases expiring at the same time of year, which is another reason why your Future Occupancy is falling short. Changing your lease terms is a way you can resolve that issue for the next year, but you can't fix a problem like that if it's coming up in the next few weeks.

Properly diagnosing and solving a future vacancy problem can take a long time depending on the severity of the issue (more on that later). But if your Future Occupancy projects to be 1% percent or more below your Future Target, you can have these plans in place to address the issue automatically.

Automated Solution No. 1: Concessions and Specials

When your Future Occupancy Projection drops 1% or more below your Future Occupancy Target, you should enable your managers to offer a special or discount on monthly rent for floorplans that may be struggling. This should enhance leasing velocity and quickly get you back to an acceptable occupancy level. Once you've met that threshold, you can remove the special.

Automated Solution No. 2: Predictive Advertising

The beauty of digital advertising is that you don't need to have a fixed 12-month budget. You can manually increase or decrease your digital ad spend on how you see fit.

RentVision offers Predictive Advertising as a solution to our clients. Predictive advertising is designed to automatically deliver the right amount of traffic to your community's website at the right time. We can set two budgets: a high budget and a low budget. When your Future Occupancy falls, predictive advertising will automatically increase your ad budget. When your Future Occupancy is aligned (or even higher) than your Future Target, we can reduce the amount of money you're spending on digital ads.

Conclusion

We encourage clients to deploy these two automated solutions when their Future Occupancy Projections takes a slight dip below their Future Occupancy Target. If these two solutions are deployed well, you'll generally see relief to your problems 80% of the time.

But what if your problems persist? What if your Future Occupancy takes a severe drop of 2% or 3% below your Future Target? That's when you'll need more than just a shortcut to solve your issue. The root cause of your vacancy crisis goes much deeper than you thought. In my last and final blog of this series, I'll show you how to discover those issues and properly address them.