If they don't lease after X days, they won't be leasing with you...

I have a question for a property management company that really has a good grasp on their leasing statistics. I'm looking to find out some information on the likelihood of someone leasing in days after their first contact with a property. For example, after one week, the chance that someone will end up leasing with that community decreases to X%. Anybody want to help me tackle that question?

Brent,

Anyone with a good revenue management system has the stats in there. It's lease_to_GC_ratio * (1 - the "Lead Time Curve") in LRO; not sure what Yieldstar calls it or whether YS exposes the stats to users.

What you'll find is that the answer varies by community and by unit type rather dramatically; so it's not as simple as just asking what the likelihood by days since visit because it's not a single answer (or if you take an overall average, you're pasting over the real behavior and thus not getting a useful #).

Thanks for the response, Donald. It sounds like one has to go pretty granular in order to get some sort of benchmark out of it. If no benchmark is possible, then I'm not sure if it's a reasonable stat to begin with. Would it be possible to gain some insight to view it across all 1B/2B/etc, or do you think we would have to add in the layer of property class, as well? For example:

Days it takes for the likelihood of leasing to drop to 10%:
(fictional numbers)

---

1B

---

2B
Class A

---

6 days

---

8 days
Class B

---

7 days

---

9 days
Class C

---

7 days

---

10 days
(sorry for the odd formatting)

Or is this not granular enough to see trends?

Brent,

I have a comment to share. One of the things I teach all of our Leasing Professionals is to constantly focus on follow up. We work so hard to generate traffic to get new prospects in the door...but if they don't lease on the first visit, we tend to forget about them. Statistics show that 95% of all sales are made after the 5th follow up attempt and unless you are contacting the prospect 5 times in one day, that process can be spread out over a few weeks. I recently went to visit one of our communities and went through their prospect detail report and starting calling and emailing prospects. I had one individual who I first called in February and he had indicated his move in date was the end of January 2011 (note that the move in date had actually come and gone). Every time I would visit the community, I would either call or email him. Do you know that after several months of calls and emails, he moved in during Memorial Day? It just goes to show you that if you work the leads you already have, you will find that your follow up efforts will pay off.

Hi Desiree - thanks for sharing your thoughts! There are two things I think this information will help with:

1) Let's say we find that the odds of leasing to a prospect drop to 10% after 5 days, then that would be a great lesson for our leasing consultants to not let their leads go "cold". It's one thing to say that you need to follow up immediately, but if they saw how quickly a lead was essentially lost, it would be a great teaching tool!

2) I am a big believer in fighting for every lease. However, once a certain probability is reached (i.e., 10%), then I have to think that the resources could be spent more effectively somewhere else. Yes, there will be success stories like you mentioned, but what if that success story only came once in a blue moon, and while we were focusing on cold leads, we were missing out on great opportunities elsewhere which would have a much higher probability of success? Like I said, I don't want to make sure we make a full effort for every prospect, but it seems there should be a line where we are getting severely diminished returns.

Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up - that's what I preach. You call and email them until they either a) tell you to stop or b) change their phone number. If time is being slotted each day for follow-up then you will always get to it all. After the initial 24 hour follow-up I recommend continued follow-up every 2 to 3 days for the first week, then shift into once a week thereafter. You don't want to feel like Spam to the prospect, but you do want them to know that you haven't forgotten about them which in a sense tells them that you value and care about them.

If we could see some accurate data on this topic it could also help us determine the appropriate time in the sales process to introduce leasing incentives (free parking, gift cards, concessions etc). For instance, if on C-properties, we discover that 90% of people make their leasing decision within 3 days, then it would be better to offer your incintives upon first visit. However, with A-properties, if the average person is going to shop for 10-14 days, then being able to offer additional incentives during the follow up process may be better(as opposed to playing all of your cards at once).

Brilliant thought, Danny.