Automation is the Key to
Improving Employee Efficiency
and Increasing Visits and Leases
By Todd Katler
I
f you’re a mid-sized property manager or apartment owner,
you probably employ more than a 100 leasing agents.
Combined, they probably communicate with more than a
thousand prospects a day.
According to our internal data, 42 percent of those
communications are about scheduling tours or rescheduling tours.
While it may seem that this metric confirms that leasing agents are
properly asking for tours, it also confirms that leasing agents are
spending entirely too much time doing what most industries have
already automated.
What if you could eliminate the time it takes to schedule
a tour? What if your leasing agents had that time back to sign
leases and contact new leads? Maybe, just maybe you’d close even
more leases and delight residents enough for them to renew their
leases in greater numbers no matter the rent increase. Yet, many
owner/operators are hesitant to adopt automation tools like self-
scheduling and self-guided tours based on three
main misconceptions.
Misconception #1: Prospects want
more human interaction, not less
It seems logical. You’ve spent a lot of
time, money and effort hiring good
people with customer service skills.
You know from being in business for
decades that relationships garner sales.
You personally like to interact with people
when making large transactions.
But you’re not the customer. Today’s
prospective renters, mostly millennials,
want less human interaction.
The more they can do on
32 | TRENDS JULY 2019
an app on their smartphone, the better. They just want a person
to be available in the rare case that they need them. And the data
shows that prospects who book a tour through a self-scheduling
solution convert to leases at twice the rate of those who book their
visits through traditional channels, according to an Anyone Home
study. In addition, self-scheduling technology results in three to
five times higher showing set ratios.
Misconception #2: A leasing agent can respond fast
enough for prospects if we implement the right
policies
We all know that speed of communication is critical for service
providers today. That’s why we’ve tightened the standards for our
leasing agents, often expecting them to respond to email leads
within 24 hours. But the average leasing agent response time to
an email lead is still 48 hours. That’s not fast enough for 56 percent
of prospects, who want to tour within 24 hours of reaching out
to a community via email. Add the back and forth necessary to
schedule the tour and you’re probably closer to 72 hours before
the tour is set.
Automating that scheduling process means a tour can be
scheduled immediately and the prospect gets to pick the
time without leasing agent interaction. It’s faster and
more convenient.
Misconception #3: Automation won’t save me money
or increase sales
Most operators aren’t going to
eliminate all their leasing
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