$300,000 a year. That's how much owners and managers with 100 properties spend on manual market surveys.

The traditional approach to market surveys is tedious and cumbersome. Leasing teams spend hours collecting data into spreadsheets, cutting into their customer service and property management responsibilities.

While a cornerstone of multifamily growth, manual market surveys are diminishing your bottom line. Factors that contribute to rising costs for multifamily enterprises include: 

1. Resources

A leasing professional spends approximately one day each month aggregating comp data. That's 12 business days a year of removed focus from tenant and property management. Your tenants' happiness depends on customer service and maintained communities.

Relying on leasing staff to conduct manual market surveys can greatly impact business revenue. Think about these associated resource costs of conducting manual market surveys:

• Staff wages
• Reporting frequency (weekly, monthly, and quarterly)
• Time spent on data versus other priorities

2. ILS systems

Do you know where your data comes from? Teams using ILS systems to collect property information aren't receiving an accurate full story.

The data returned is scrubbed from their ILS database (only their users), which can 1) pigeonhole your data and 2) unintentionally lead to private data sharing.

Property and pricing details are generally outdated and non-compliant, leading to skewed data and reporting. Furthermore, you might consider that not all your competitors are on ILS systems. Some properties may find better leads from owned marketing efforts. These are pertinent insights missing from your market surveys. 

3. Geographical Coverage

Your geographical coverage can factor into the cost of your manual market surveys. Researching markets and submarkets requires mindful observation from your team. You're collecting data on a large scale–territories are more concentrated.

Obtaining all the relevant property insights that matter to owners takes time. Just think of the detailed insights they expect:

• Concession details attracting renters
• Total units of comparable properties
• Leasing velocity growth/decline
• Hidden availability of units
• Average rent of the competition
• Unit mix at properties
• Amenity comparisons 

4. Survey Scope

 In-depth manual market surveys increase costs. The scope of metrics demands more research, focus, and time to gather information.

Unit-level granularity in your reports conveys comprehensive insights that help owners strategize their portfolios. Some of these pricing and availability metrics they want to see include:

• Gross rent
• Net effective rent (NER)
• Total available units
• New available units
• Days on market
• Date of availability

Closing

Using manual market surveys can be quite expensive. It's costing multifamily businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and labor required to collect data, which can heavily impact customer service and property maintenance.

Staggering costs may indicate it's time to reconsider the traditional market survey process. A modern approach accelerates workflows and returns accurate, ethically sourced data in a flash so you can reallocate cost savings where fitting.