QUICK SUMMARY // Every apartment operator wants their communities to be both profitable and occupied, but many lack a clear strategy for setting rent prices that achieve those goals. As a result, decisions to raise or lower rents are often made without direction or the right data. If that’s where you are, and you’re ready to retake control of your revenue management strategy, this guide is for you. You’ll get practical pricing guidance and insights for achieving your community's financial goals.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: How Does Apartment Pricing Impact Revenue?
- What Is Multifamily Revenue Management?
- What's Your Community's Rent Pricing Strategy?
- How Do You Implement Your Community's Rent Pricing Strategy?
- How Is a Rent Price Actually Calculated?
- What Variables Go Into Setting Rent Prices?
- Is It Wrong to Follow a Competitor's Rent Prices?
- When Should You Raise or Lower Apartment Rent Prices?
- How Often Should You Change Your Apartment's Rent Prices?
- When Should You Offer Rent Specials?
- How Should You Price Lease Renewals?
- How Can You Align Apartment Pricing with Marketing?
- Conclusion: What's the Best Path Forward to Smarter Revenue Management for Apartments?
Introduction:
How Does Apartment Pricing Impact Revenue?
Do you want higher occupancy? Change your rent price.
Do you want to be more profitable? Again, just change your rent price.
You get the point—apartment pricing impacts everything.
The line between the wrong and the best rent price is small—but costly.
- When your rents are too low, units lease fast but you’re losing revenue on every lease.
- When your rents are too high, vacancies pile up and the only way out is offering discounts.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know pricing has high stakes. And if you’re managing a large portfolio, you know how hard it is to keep up with each community’s shifting needs.
The solution? You need a revenue management strategy.
One that helps you:
- Set new lease and renewal rents confidently
- Know when to raise or lower prices
- Use specials only when they’ll actually help
- Prevent vacancy crises with ideal expiration timing
This guide will help you take full control of your apartment community's revenue—and make market-leading pricing decisions that align with each of your property's performance goals.
What is Multifamily Revenue Management?
Multifamily revenue management is a strategic process of setting rent prices and lease terms to achieve an apartment community's financial goals.
A strategy matters—especially when demand, leasing trends, or occupancy always changes. Without one, you stay stuck in a costly cycle of reaction.
But reaching your goals takes more than just setting the right price. It also requires your leasing, marketing, and management strategies to work in sync. That’s what makes revenue management so impactful—it aligns every part of a community's operation around performance.
💰 Learn how multifamily revenue management strategies affect marketing, leasing, and operations.
What's Your Community's Rent Pricing Strategy?
This is the first step of multifamily revenue management—knowing your pricing strategy. Sure, you want your community to be profitable. The question is how.
Apartment communities typically aim for one of these three common pricing strategies:
Highest Occupancy
This strategy is ideal for communities focusing on keeping occupancy high year-round to keep cash on hand, secure financing, and avoid lengthy vacancy durations.
High Gross Potential Rent
This strategy is ideal for those who think their communities' prices are too low, and they're okay with risking lower occupancy for rent growth. This also works for increasing the value of the property in advance of a potential sale.
Balanced Approach
This strategy works for any apartment community who wants stability—strong occupancy, close-to-market rate rents, and avoiding excessive vacancy exposure.
A pricing strategy guides everything from how you set rents, apply discounts, and offer renewals.
💰 Learn how to choose the right pricing strategy for your apartments.
How Do You Implement Your Pricing Strategy?
Once you've set your pricing strategy, the next step is to implement it—and there's two ways to do it.
Option 1: Set Prices Manually
This can make sense for smaller portfolios with only a couple of properties or fewer units—but it still has challenges that cannot be ignored.
To succeed, you need to make pricing decisions at the right time, with the right information, and in the right cadence.
Otherwise, it's easy for your pricing strategy to unravel:
- Prices sit too high when occupancy is low.
- Discounts are applied aggressively on units that are already leasing fast.
- Internal disagreements stall pricing decisions or lead to inconsistent changes.
Option 2: Use Revenue Management Software
For larger portfolios—or any apartment community looking for greater pricing consistency—using revenue management software is the smarter option.
A revenue management product—like RentVision Revenue Management—automates your pricing strategy, setting and adjusting unit rents based on each community's unique circumstances and goals.
Revenue management software can also help with keeping prices consistent across multiple platforms—especially between your property management software and marketing channels like the website.
No matter which approach you use—manual or automated—the rest of this guide will help you apply your pricing strategy more effectively.
How Is a Rent Price Actually Calculated?
Once you've identified your community's financial goals, the next step in multifamily revenue management is setting the right rent price.
A unit's final rent price is more than just a number with a dollar sign that renters see on your website—it’s a carefully calculated value that reflects:
Floorplan Base Rent
This is the starting price for all units in a specific floorplan. It reflects your property’s class, amenities, location, demand, and local market. It’s not the final price—just the baseline. You’ll adjust this baseline up or down when pricing changes are warranted.
Unit Amenities
Unit amenities assign value to the differences between units of the same floorplan. For example, you would charge more for a unit with a view of the pool and less for one overlooking your trash area. Charging for unit amenities helps increase your apartment's total revenue while also giving renters pricing transparency based on what they value most.
Discounts or Specials
Some units lease faster than others. When a floorplan or specific units aren't getting traction, running a special can help. A floorplan discount reduces the market rent for an entire underperforming floorplan. Or, you could apply a discount to a specific unit that's sat vacant too long—without changing the base rent.
Lease Length
The lease term also impacts pricing. Your baseline is a standard 12-month lease. Shorter leases typically cost more per month. Longer leases would qualify for a lower monthly rent. Offering varied lease terms helps attract more renters while also protecting your community's pricing strategy.
Lease Expiration Timing
Lease expiration timing also cannot be ignored. If there are other leases within the same floorplan or bedroom configuration expiring around the same time in the future, rent prices may be reduced to avoid the possible impact of excess move-outs (along with the costs of turnover). Inversely, if there are no other similar leases expiring, prices may be pushed up because there's less risk down the road.
💰 Learn how to use the five key components of rent prices and achieve your financial goals.
What Variables Should You Use to Set the Right Rent Price?
Setting rent prices can feel overwhelming. Everyone has their opinion. Your market is changing. Your occupancy and vacancy are changing. There's so much data to take in—but most of it can be just noise.
To set optimal prices, focus on your community's unique supply, demand, and projected demand.
Supply
Your supply counts units currently available for rent.
That includes:
- Vacant, turned units ready for immediate move-ins
- Or occupied, on notice units with leases expiring in the next several weeks
Demand
Demand reflects renters' interest in leasing your units.
It factors in:
- Website Traffic. The higher your website traffic, the higher your demand—and vice versa. Traffic is affected by seasonality or manipulated by paid advertising.
- Seasonality. Every community's seasonality is unique, but it reflects the timing of peak and slow leasing seasons.
- Pricing. Competitive rent prices or move-in specials are incentives that could boost demand.
- Appeal. Everything from a community's location, property class, unit finishes, amenities, and reputation impact how renters feel about it—and how it competes in the market.
- Marketing. How the property reaches and attracts qualified leads, along with its overall online presentation, affects unit interest and leasing velocity.
Projected Demand
Projected demand focuses on what's coming down the road that could affect how much interest there is in your units.
Look at:
- Move-Outs. To understand how much demand you'll need in the future, you need to know how many move-outs are occurring in the next 30-60 days. If you want to look further ahead, then lease expiration timing should also be reviewed.
- Organic Traffic. This traffic counts only direct or organic search visits your website gets, representing your true seasonality. Your seasonality curve usually repeats itself annually, giving you clearer context of demand at certain points of the year. This data can help you understand if you're going to have enough organic traffic to fill the units that are coming available in the next few weeks fast, or if you're going to have a problem that warrants a price change, discount, or increase in marketing spend.
How Does Supply and Demand Affect Rent Prices?
- Higher demand and low supply = higher rents
- Less demand and high supply = lower rents
- Higher projected demand with few lease expirations = higher rents
- Lower projected demand with many lease expirations = lower rents
This is why using your community's unique data helps set optimal prices and keep your financial goals intact.
Is It Wrong to Follow a Competitor's Rent Prices?
Yes, it’s wrong to follow your competitors’ rent prices. Here's why:
It Derails Your Pricing Strategy
If a community next door had 98% occupancy and lowered its rents—would you truly want to follow that?
That's the core issue: Following competitors abandons your own pricing strategy.
When all you’re doing is reacting to what others are doing, your prices will never reflect your community's actual value, supply, demand, or goals.
It's A Legal and Ethical Gray Area
It isn't illegal to check your competitors' public rent prices and follow their trends. But choosing to do so puts your community in a risky gray area.
What is illegal and unethical is pricing collusion—communities knowingly working together to artificially inflate their rent prices to control the market.
Even without intent, communities using the same revenue management software can unknowingly participate in coordinated price increases if its algorithms use private performance data to influence each other's prices.
The irony is, though, that what starts out as simple "price matching" can spiral to a circular dependency where multiple communities adjust price based on everyone else. And what does that look like? Price collusion.
Long before revenue management software's legal scrutiny came into focus, we built RentVision Revenue Management to set prices using only a community's unique supply and demand data—no competitor data, ever.
Blindly following competitor prices is risky. Better multifamily management strategies depend on an individual community's performance and pricing strategy. And if you're using a revenue management tool to price your units, be careful which one you choose.
💰 Stop copying what other apartments are charging—and do this instead.
When Should You Raise or Lower Apartment Rent Prices?
Raising or lowering rent should never be a random act. Every adjustment should reflect your chosen pricing strategy and based on what your community's supply and demand indicators are telling you.
Let’s walk through both sides of the pricing equation:
When to Raise Rents
- You have more demand than available supply. You’ve got a small number of units left but tons of interest from prospective renters. That’s a strong signal to raise rent. Those units just got more valuable.
- Your leasing velocity is a little too good. If you’re barely listing a unit before it's leased, your prices are likely too low. Leasing fast is great until it starts costing you revenue. A slight bump could help you hit revenue goals without hurting occupancy.
- Your projected demand is about to spike. If you’re heading into your busy leasing season, raise rents ahead of time. High traffic and lead volume give you more pricing power—so take advantage of it.
- Related floorplans are in high demand. If your 2 bed/1 bath floorplan is flying off the shelf, your 2 bed/2 bath could be undervalued. Use strong demand indicators in one layout to justify raising rent on a similar floorplan.
When to Lower Rents
- You have more vacancies than interest. Seasonal slowdowns—like winter—can leave units sitting. Lowering rent slightly might be all it takes to generate the demand you need.
- Units are sitting vacant too long. If one unit or floorplan is struggling, it’s time to act. You could apply a unit-specific discount, revisit amenity pricing, or reduce the base rent for an underperforming floorplan.
- Your projected demand is dipping. When you’re entering a slower leasing period, lowering rent in advance can help you stay ahead of the dip so you don’t have to scramble with bigger discounts later.
- Similar floorplans aren’t leasing. If none of your two-bedroom layouts are generating leads, it’s a sign your pricing isn’t aligned with demand. Lowering the base rent for those floorplans can help reset interest.
When your pricing decisions align with real renter demand, you’re not being random or reactive. You're in control and maximizing revenue.
💰 See why demand-based pricing is the future of multifamily apartments.
How Often Should You Change Your Apartment's Rent Prices?
How often you change your rent prices depends on each community's strategy and leasing needs. The key is to find a rhythm that achieves your goals without adding friction to your teams or renters.
If you’re using revenue management software, weekly changes often make sense. If you’re pricing manually, a monthly or quarterly cadence might be more realistic.
Let’s look at the most common pricing time frames and how each impacts leasing performance.
- Daily: Some revenue management software updates prices daily. But is that actually helpful? In many cases, no. Daily price changes disrupt the renter’s journey—prices shift between their first tour and the moment they’re ready to sign. That can lead to hesitation, or worse, cause them to walk away altogether. Daily price changes can also be time intensive for property staff to review.
- Weekly: This is the cadence we use with our multifamily pricing tool, RentVision Revenue Management. Why? Weekly changes still help you keep up with ever-changing supply and demand while also being less disruptive to renters and leasing staff. If you're setting prices manually, a weekly cadence may still be too frequent to keep up with.
- Monthly or Quarterly: These time frames make more sense if you’re adjusting prices manually. But here’s the key: just because you’re changing prices less often doesn’t mean you can afford to be random. You still need a process. Looking ahead to your future supply and expected traffic gives you the insights you need to make meaningful changes that support your financial goals.
Each cadence has its pros and cons. Don’t change often enough, and your pricing lags behind the market. Change too often, and you disrupt leasing.
Choose a Pricing Cadence That Supports The Leasing Journey
Imagine seeing one price in an ad, another on the website, and a third when you tour. That confusion makes renters hesitate at a critical point in their leasing journey—and, ultimately, hurts your apartment marketing strategy.
The more often the price changes, the more likely it is that those prices aren't pulled by ILSs or a chatbot from your Property Management Software fast enough, causing those mismatches to occur.
A consistent cadence (like weekly changes) keeps things aligned across all of your marketing touchpoints.
Better marketing makes your apartments more valuable. Smart pricing helps you capture that value.
When the two work together, you generate more demand, justify higher rents, and move closer to hitting your community’s performance goals.
The goal is balance—a pricing cadence built around your strategy, free from friction, and powered by your data.
When Should You Offer Rent Specials?
Rent specials can be incredibly useful—but only when they’re applied intentionally.
The timing, amount, and application of a rent special should always align with your property’s revenue strategy.
Otherwise, what starts as a smart fix can quickly spiral into a costly mistake.
When Rent Specials Hurt:
- You run a special too late—after vacancies have been sitting for a while—and leave it on too long, even after the problem’s been solved.
- You run community-wide discounts when only your two-bedroom floorplan is struggling. Discounting units that would have been leased at the market is revenue you can't get back.
- You apply the same discount to different floorplans, even though one has 20% vacancy and the other only 10%. (Shouldn’t the floorplan with more vacancy get the bigger discount?)
When Rent Specials Work:
- You apply the discount before vacancy becomes a major problem—and turn it off as soon as performance rebounds.
- You apply discounts only to struggling units or floorplans, and you adjust the amount based on how much vacancy each floorplan has.
- The special is simple and clear, like “One Month Free.” No confusing fine print.
Rent specials are a tool—not a fallback plan—to help you execute your community's pricing strategy.
💰 Learn how to run rent specials that protect your apartment community's revenue.
How Should You Price Lease Renewals?
Renewal pricing depends on three main factors:
What’s the Market Rent Price at the Time of Renewal?
If market rent is higher than what your resident is currently paying, you have options:
- Offer a large increase near or at-market rate. It's a risk, though. This option may upset residents, force them out and damage your reputation.
- Offer a moderate increase—something in between their current rate and the current to market, but still below what a new resident would pay. This helps retain good residents while increasing revenue.
- Or, if keeping occupancy high is your goal, you might offer to renew at or close to their current rate. That could save you turn costs and maintain higher overall base rents on vacant units that get leased to new residents.
If market rent is lower than what they’re paying now, the situation can be trickier because most apartment operators don't want to lower rent. When this happens, you can:
- Offer the same rent they're currently paying—but this could backfire, especially if you're marketing available units in their floorplan at lower rates.
- Allow for some level of price decrease, but still offer a renewal rent that's between their current rate and the current market rate. This gives renters a better deal while preserving your rent roll.
- Go the simple route and offer them the current market rate. That'll help avoid turnover and vacancy costs, and make the renewal conversation less difficult.
How Many Leases Are Expiring Around the End of the Current Lease Term?
The next thing to look at is lease expiration timing, which impacts which pricing option to choose.
If the current lease is expiring around the same time as others in the same floorplan, offer a competitive renewal price that'll be harder for renters to turn down. The main goal is to avoid adding more potential vacancies and operational strain at the wrong time.
If there aren't a lot of other leases expiring, however, you could go with one of the more premium pricing options. While you want to remain fair with the price of your renewal, you're not going to be as exposed if the resident decides to go.
How Long Does the Resident Want to Stay?
Renewal pricing also depends on the lease term.
- Shorter terms (like 3 or 6 months) typically cost more per month.
- Longer terms (13+ months) might qualify for a slight discount.
But here’s the twist—you also need to consider when the next lease will expire.
Let’s say it’s mid-May—your peak leasing season—and a resident wants to renew for just six months. That would put their new expiration date in November, one of your slowest leasing months.
That timing alone is a reason to raise the rent on the 6-month renewal compared to a standard 12-month option.
Keep these general rules in mind when it comes to lease terms in renewal offers:
- Shorter renewal terms = higher monthly rent
- Longer terms = lower rent
- Many leases expiring of same bedroom configuration = justified pricing premium (to encourage alternative terms)
- Good expiration timing = justified pricing reduction
How Can You Align Apartment Pricing with Marketing?
Marketing communicates your community's value—and rent pricing is what reflects it.
If your marketing falls flat, renters won’t see why your apartments are worth the rent. If your pricing feels erratic or mismatched, even great marketing can’t save the deal.
Here’s how to make sure your two most powerful demand levers are working in sync:
Use the Same Data to Guide Marketing and Pricing Changes
The best pricing and marketing decisions are based on the same insights—your community’s unique supply and demand indicators.
That includes:
- Website traffic
- Leasing performance
- Upcoming lease expirations
For example, if you have a wave of vacancies coming, use that data to adjust both your pricing and marketing strategy proactively.
💰 Learn why rent pricing and marketing strategies must work together.
Keep Pricing Accurate Everywhere
Prospective renters can see pricing across your multiple marketing sources during their apartment search—and as we've mentioned before, it's critical that pricing is accurate everywhere.
And don't forget the website itself. Any inaccuracies in price on your floorplan page, chatbot, or online application creates friction that kills conversions.
💰 Here's how to keep rents consistent across your marketing platforms.
Conclusion: What's the Best Path Forward to Smarter Revenue Management for Apartments?
If you want better revenue, you need better pricing.
That starts by choosing a revenue management strategy that aligns with your community’s financial goals—not someone else’s.
You’ve learned that rent pricing isn’t just a number—it’s a value made up of floorplan base rent, unit amenities, lease terms, and specials.
And you’ve seen why using your community’s unique supply and demand data will always outperform risky competitor comparisons.
To recap:
- Raise or lower prices based on your own demand—real renter behavior.
- Use a pricing cadence that doesn't frustrate the leasing experience.
- Apply specials intentionally—not as a fallback option.
- Structure renewals that are fair to the current resident and your community.
- Keep your pricing and marketing aligned so you can charge confidently.
That's why the best path forward for your revenue management strategy is to invest in pricing software to help.
What Makes RentVision Revenue Management Different?
RentVision Revenue Management gives you the control you want and the automation you need to tie each community's pricing strategy together.
If your portfolio's pricing strategy needs to be more proactive, more scalable, and more aligned with actual demand—not your competitors'—this is the smarter path forward.
Schedule your demo of RentVision Revenue Management today.