Turnover statistics

Does anyone have a breakdown of turnover by unit type? I only see Stats that clump all unit types together. Our turnover is high and we broke it down and realized that it was really low for all unit types except for Studios. So instead of offering resident retention incentives across the board we are focusing on Studios.

Naturally studios, generally will have a more transitory resident and hence higher turnover. So it makes sense, in our case, to target incentives to studios.

I'd appreciate any insight into turnover breakdowns by unit type.

thanks,
Martin

That's a really interesting concept, Martin. I've never seen it broken out that way in any public resource, unfortunately...

Martin,

Love the concept of unit vs. property. I don't believe I have seen such turnover statistics outside of single-family home per size (sales), but I'm sure you can use the same concept the Real Estate Agents use. It may take a bit of adjustments, but I'm sure the reports will be similar to your needs.

That is a great question. Community by community you can track it and I love that you are doing so.

I've never seen it broken down anywhere.

I hate to say it, but I have to concur with all of the other posts -- I have seen a lot of multifamily data and reports in my day, but I have never seen a turnover report that broke down turnovers based on unit type. Good luck. Great job however in identifying your weak point on turnovers. My guess is that several other readers of this post will start to do the same.

When you base turnover on unit types you are analyzing it with a smaller sample size. This would obviously cause irregular swings if your resident mix wasn't ideal. Given that I love the idea and will probably create some reports which will calculate this out. Would be curious to see the results. Thanks for this post.

Naturally if you break it down by unit type your sample size shrinks and degree of error goes up.
On our analysis we used 1000 units broken down by unit type and the glaring differences in turnover became obvious.(low 40% for 1, 2 and 3 bedroom, and 119% for studios) It's hard to understand that no one in the industry seems to have had the presence of mind to do the same. We don't need to give incentives to 1,2 and 3 bedrooms, but we certainly need to consider retention program for studios. Without this analysis, (even with a decreased sample size) we would be throwing money all over the map rather than focusing our efforts. Hopefully these large analytical organizations will, in the future, break down turnover by unit type so we too can better understand the national numbers and use them to help set our target rates.

Taking unit type info into account is always a good thing to do for all decision making, when you look at revenue management it is very focused on unit type historical data, unit type market data, etc.. in making it's pricing recommendations.

One thing to consider would be to provide incentives for people to sign longer lease terms for both renewals and new leases, higher rent for shorter terms and lower rent for longer terms, etc. For renewals, you can offer higher rates if they sign a shorter term lease than their current lease and offer your best rate for terms longer than their current lease term.

This can be hard to manage without software like Realpage's Price Optimizer (which we are currently testing at 5 properties) or LRO but may be worth the effort.

Consumers in our industry are getting used to having choices as they do in many other industries and we have found that it actually helps to get them more engaged in the leasing process.