It's a stat that should haunt the dreams of multifamily marketing directors everywhere.

According to an Anyone Home study, to replace a lost property website lead, operators have to spend 4.25 times the dollar amount it took to attract the original lead.

Think about all of the time, effort and money it takes to design and implement the right marketing campaign to attract the right prospects. Multifamily marketers typically spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on generating digital leads for their communities.

But when operators mismanage leads, they waste that effort and expense and force marketers to spend even more money. Simply put, to make the most out of their marketing budgets, operators need to have systems in place that allow their communities to respond quickly to prospects and that enable leasing associates to focus their time on the activities that convert leads.

So Many Lost Leads

Unfortunately, too many operators are positioned to lose too many leads.

Consider that Anyone Home data shows the average apartment property misses a whopping 56 percent of its inbound leasing phone calls. A lot of these missed calls happen because overextended associates are handling one of their many other critical responsibilities, such as taking prospects on tour or tending to the needs and concerns of current residents. That’s not to mention the 15 and 20 percent of calls that take place when the community is closed.

Self-service is the New Customer Service

You could solve this problem by chaining one associate to their desk to answer calls all day long. Or you could do what tech and customer savvy operators are doing – implementing a call center along with self-service tools like self-scheduling and self-guided tours.

Giving prospects the ability to self-schedule tours through a community website is an extremely powerful way to keep a prospect interested in a community and push them along the sales funnel. Prospects often want to tour a property within 24 hours of contacting a community, but all of the back-and-forth communication with agents to schedule a tour can prevent this from happening.

A self-scheduling tool streamlines the workdays of onsite associates, as Anyone Home data shows that 42 percent of onsite teams' communications with leads concerns the scheduling or rescheduling of tours. Giving prospects the option to schedule and take self-guided tours can result in associates having more time to follow up with leads, develop rapport with prospects and focus on closing new leases.

The Helping Hand of Automation

Operators can also implement a number of automated solutions to keep leads engaged by delivering information quickly. Some examples include automated responses to texts and emails that instantly provide information to leads and let them know that someone will follow up with them soon.

In addition, chat bots can engage prospects who reach out any time of day and answer their questions. Today's prospects want to interact with a community at any time that is convenient for them. If they're not able to, they're likely to move on to another property.

Finally, a quality CRM can optimize lead management by providing a clear, up-to-date record of where prospects are in the sales process. It can automate the appropriate follow-up according to a prospect's specific stage within the sales funnel and reduce lost leads.

Let's face it: It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of dollars to attract quality prospects to your communities. To make your marketing budgets as efficient as possible, your communities have to be ready to respond quickly to prospects in their preferred communication channels, and your leasing associates have to have the bandwidth to keep moving leads down the demand funnel.